Serial Peripheral Interface

I was asked to solve the interfacing E1 chip via SPI. First, try out with the parallel port in my PC, then, followed by the configurable processor. Both are running Linux. SPI uses only 4 I/O pins, thus, making it a perfect choice if you don’t want to waste your address mapping. The only setback is that it is a serial communication. Using the customized processor in FPGA, one single bit data transfer consumes 67.2 us. A read from or write to a register for 8-bit data takes about 1.68ms. Luckily, this is simply used for initial configuration and random monitoring purposes.

Waveform captured from the logic analyzer…… Look like glitches occur in the SDO line

Niibe Yutaka & Debian

Had an opportunity to met Debian developer, Mr. Niibe Yutaka yesterday. This was the workshop organized by IEEE Computer Society, but more like a technical talk. Frankly, I was quite disappointed with the presentation. Perhaps, developer is not good in presentation but or maybe I expect for more technical insights. Basically, the talk focuses on advocating the “Free” software, the policies of Japanese government regarding Open Source and also the KuroBox/Pro. Some introduction to this little NAS box:

CPU: ARM9
Flash: NOR – for u-boot storage NAND – for linux kernel, rootfs
GPIO: 2 pin
Ethernet & USB Port

and yes Nibbe ported the debian GNU/Linux inside the box, showed us a simple demonstration on stepper motor and used the USB VGA adapter for X-Windows (sluggish). He even put the emacs on to the box. As I know, emacs is usually not included in embedded system, too big. Sound like a good education tool!

Anyone has try out debian distribution. I just Ubuntu is one of many derivative from Debian

Salary RM 1,345,815 per week

How much you earn nowsaday? Can you imagine that you are going to earn ₤ 200,000 per week? Approximately RM 1,345,815. Crazy!!!!

Send your kids to football schools in England and hoping them to become a super star in EPL.

The news in BBC about Top English Club players’ wages reaching ₤ 1bn:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6705251.stm

But where the money comes from for our beloved Chelsea? Mainly from Russian….

Anniversary Dinner

Have had a dinner in Deutsch Haus at Changkat Bukit Bintang with my girlfriend for our 1 year anniversary on Friday night. At first, we plan to go to Coliseum Café but chose to try something new. I ordered a BBQ plat “Wurst” while my gf preferred Chicken Breast Roaster. I enjoy the sausage but still think of the "Curry Wurst" which I had before in Berlin. It costs cheaper and tastes good whenever you feel hungry at night. My gf said that she was only impressed with the mushroom soup (ah, not from Campbell one). We also have our love heart "jelly cake" the next day. My gf said that, "You will not easily get fat even you eat a lot". After you see it, you probably will think differently.....

Car Accident

Had a bad accident last Saturday at around 1.30 p.m. in SS2 PJ. Luckily, both my girlfriend and I were safe and no one was hurt. A car coming from opposite way banged the front and back doors on the left hand-side of my car. I was turning into the small road on my right hand side at that time. After the traffic police’s inspection, I was free from any offences. The driver who banged my car has to pay the summons. Now, my car was in the workshop waiting for repair. However, I had to go to UniAsia office to fill in the claim form by myself. According to workshop agent, this is to avoid any irresponsible agent filling the claim forms without the notice of their clients. If you ever buy the insurance from UniAsia, you probably have to do the same.

My third major car accident.... not enough sleep while driving is always dangerous

A Picture is worth A Thousand Words

Tax Returns

Today is the final day for those taxpayers to submit their BE forms, including me. But once you know that you are paying for the government and getting back nothing, you will be sad for that. You just can’t believe that how smart enough our BN government spent our money in Ijok buy-election. Yes, they win but with all our taxpayers’ money. You can’t imagine that a small area with little development before is like suddenly winning “once-in-a-lifetime” lottery. So, you all have to pray for your assemblyman suddenly getting heart-attack. Sorry for saying that. It’s much easy than you winning the lottery, I think. If you ever went there last week, you could see incredible development in such a pace. Then, you really believe in “Malaysia Boleh” slogan. When you know that you have to pay tax to the government, and your money will go to Ijok, which I personally think that it’s unnecessary. Then, you will echo the same sentiment, “I am sad for Malaysia”.

The Republic of Apartments

I have had short discussion with my Korean friend before on this. Just read it why Koreans prefer apartment rather than landed properties.

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200704/200704240024.html

Free Speech is Enhanced by Civility?

Do you think that it's time for us to have code of conduct? Then our Ministry of Energy, Water and Communications plans to ask Bloggers using local hosted web-site to register. Censorship on Bloggers?

Weekend Activities

Attended the IEEE ComSoc/VT Strategic Planning meeting on Saturday. Learn a new group decision making technique known as Quality Function Deployment (QFD). It is indeed a useful way of making group decision. We had invited Prof. Lawrence Wong from NUS as facilitator and he did a good job for sharing his knowledge and experience in running the society. I had learned one or two things during the meeting. At night, I had attended one of ex-housemate weeding dinner with my girlfriend.

Then, went to Machap Baru on Sunday. It was hectic schedule and I had to wake up as early as 5 morning. My friend asked me to become one of the moderators for the workshop discussion session since I had experience in election campaign ten years ago. The major event was the Peoples Forum in Machap Flat at night. Several speakers went on the stage to share their views, include press freedom, election monitoring, SOS issue and etc. I hate to say that BN will have no problem winning the seat based on the feedback during door-to-door visit.

When You are Tired and Out of Idea

IEEE ICIT 2007 in Shenzhen - Best Paper

I had made my first technical presentation outside Malaysia. The presented paper was “Distributed PCI Processing Mechanism utilizing PCI Backplane for 3G Node-B”. It is all about Base Transceiver Station architecture and describes our communication mechanism for exchanging the user and signaling traffics between several different data acquisition boards. Surprisingly, this paper has been selected as the Best Conference Paper in Shenzhen. This IEEE conference was sponsored by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. When I first saw the term “Integration Technology”, I had no idea that it was going to do with Robotics. This 3-day conference presented 16 plenary talks with titles mainly surrounding Market Survey in China and Taiwan, Robotics, Image Processing and Artificial Intelligence. It is interesting to find out how peoples integrating their daily life with robots. Anyway, the conference papers look more diverse and the research scopes include RF design, WSN, Grid Computing and etc. Majority of the paper contributors are from China mainland.

At Presentation Hall

Award Ceremony

Session Chair, Hadi from Pakistan, and CHUK PhD Researcher

Prof. Paolo Dario, Keynote Speaker

Terrible Experience

I am now in Shenzhen to attend an IEEE conference. I considered myself having a nightmare on Tuesday. This was my first experience traveling with Shenzhen Airline and my very first experience traveling oversea with Airline other than MAS and AirAsia. The flight was scheduled as early as 7.55 a.m. and I had arrived at the airport around 5.30 a.m. I had a bad experience missing the flight to Kuching before. That’s why I always very careful and usually arrive at the airport 2 hours before that. When all the passengers entered the flight and it just one or two seconds before the flight departure, the pilot made an announcement that “the flight encounters some technical problems”. We were asked to stay in the flight for more than 1 hour before they asked us to return to the Departure Hall. We had wait there for more than 3 hours and no announcement been made. Quite a number of peoples started to loss their patient and decided to ask the Shenzhen Airline official to come. Only then the official came and transferred us to the hotel and he said that he can’t promise us the flight exact departure time. He claimed that one component was damaged and the spare part was not available in Malaysia. So, have to wait for the flight coming from Shenzhen bringing that component. During the arrangement to the hotel, the priority was given to those who holding the China passports. The local Malaysians were transferred to a hotel in Salak Tinggi, called Empress Hotel. Hear about this before? Alright, I was treated as 2nd Class citizen in my country because I don’t see those who holding the China passports. Perhaps, I am too sensitive in this. Then, we were informed that the flight was scheduled on next day 2.00 a.m. The flight finally departure at 3.00 a.m. So, 1 hour delay again!

I will be back on this Sunday. Hope that this time the flight will departure in time.

Picture taken at my desk in the Pavilion Century Tower Hotel....

Two Asian Player Scored in EPL

I was excited with ManU games last Saturday. We are closed to the EPL champion again. There are 8 games to go. I believe that it’s hard to repeat the treble once again since we have had a lot of injuries recently. But I am glad to see the Asian players making marks in the EPL. Two of them scored on last weekend matches. I am particular pleased with Ji-Sung Park with his two goal contribution against Bolton. I believe that if he can improve on his finishing, he will be one of the secret weapons for ManU.

By the way, if you don’t hear about Bolton, it is actually a club from Manchester area, same with Manchester City, Wigan, Oldham, Stockport, Bury, Macclesfield, Rochdale, ah… and FC United.

One Single Bit Make the Difference

Thanks God. I managed to solve the problem on DMA. I need to explicitly trigger the Bus Master enable bit in the PCI Configuration Register since the BIOS does not set it automatically likes my PC.

Weekly Update

Hardly have time to write my blog these days. Busy taking time to solve the DMA problem in the peripheral board slotted in the cPCI chassis. The DMA engine in the PCI bridge works well in the normal PC environment using PCI converter but just refuses to work in cPCI chassis. Test with another peripheral board with different PCI bridge also facing the same problem.

Just have a small test (prufung) last week for my German class. I think that I was not doing well. In the test, I even not understand the questions, such as gegenteil – asking for opposite word, 5 satze – 5 sentence, but I thought that this is 5 questions. It is really tough this time because my teacher, Frau Koh speaks in German most of time in the class. I sometimes could not understand what she said at all.

Wind River - Microsoft of Embedded System

The latest press released from Wind River cited that it has acquired the Hard Real Time OS from FSMLabs, known as RTLinux. So, it can now offer Soft & Hard RTOS for Linux customers. Linux is actually run as separate process in RTCore for RTLinux.

http://www.windriver.com/news/press/pr.html?ID=4261

Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year to Everyone! I am in Penang now, my hometown. May you and your family have a prosperous year!

Network Management System on Network Equipment

Normally, network equipments require network management system for controlling and monitoring purposes. SNMP is one of the common tools used in commercial equipments for such purpose. For uClinux, a SNMP agent resided in the network device is available, known as net-snmp. Putting the net-snmp in uClinux is easy, but to extend the SNMP agent, a lot of works need to be done. First, have to clearly understand your system, what to monitor and what to configure. Then, come out with MIB. Then, write the code and integrate to the agent. That’s the work need to be done! Web controlling is a must for almost all network equipments nowadays. We start our normal ADSL modem in house with a web configuration page. So, putting the web server is necessary and uClinux supports HTTP server with single process and single thread. No fork is allowed since no-MMU in most of the embedded system. Then, we need Boa or thttpd. Both of them work pretty well. But need more knowledge on how to integrate the CGI. More works to be done.

Huh……

Porting uClinux to MicroBlaze

It is fun to have an opportunity to work with reconfigurable system and uClinux (you-see-linux). I had successfully ported uClinux to the Xilinx MicroBlaze development board which features Virtex-4 FPGA. Spent almost two days to map the Flash Memory due to my first impression that the Atmel Flash is compatible with Intel one. But actually it is compatible to Intel competitor, AMD! MicroBlaze is a 32-bits RISC soft processor and uClinux is Linux version for Microcontroller without MMU (see the penguin). Reconfigurable system means that you can incorporate any peripherals as you wish. These peripherals can talk to you processor via OPB, FSL or LMB. It provides a flexibility platform to the hardware designer and software designer to complete an application-specific system. I have worked with uClinux in Arcturus board before but this one is much challenging. Thanks to Dr. John Williams. It makes me a good start with such detailed information. Throughout the porting process, I have learned some new concepts, such as XIP, bFLT and flatfsd. Storing data in persistent stage using flatfsd is something news for me. It’s great to use this especially for storing the initial setting for your peripherals during startup, such as mounting the NFS for development. Ah.., a simple web server is up....

Startup Script:

Linux version 2.4.32-uc0 (root@yeow) (gcc version 3.4.1 ( Xilinx EDK 8.1 Build EDK_I.17 090206 )) #107 Fri Feb 2 14:47:37 MYT 2007
On node 0 totalpages: 16384
zone(0): 16384 pages.
zone(1): 0 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
CPU: MICROBLAZE
Kernel command line: ¸
Console: xmbserial on UARTLite
Calibrating delay loop... 49.66 BogoMIPS
Memory: 64MB = 64MB total
Memory: 60792KB available (1239K code, 2790K data, 52K init)
Dentry cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 3, 32768 bytes)
Mount cache hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Microblaze UARTlite serial driver version 1.00
ttyS0 at 0x40600000 (irq = 3) is a Microblaze UARTlite
ttyS1 at 0x40620000 (irq = 4) is a Microblaze UARTlite
Starting kswapd
xgpio #0 at 0x40000000 mapped to 0x40000000
xgpio #1 at 0x40020000 mapped to 0x40020000
xgpio #2 at 0x40040000 mapped to 0x40040000
xgpio #3 at 0x40060000 mapped to 0x40060000
Xilinx GPIO registered
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize
eth0: using fifo mode.
eth0: Xilinx EMAC #0 at 0x40C00000 mapped to 0x40C00000, irq=0
eth0: id 2.0l; block id 11, type 1
uclinux[mtd]: RAM probe address=0x241700b4 size=0x280000
uclinux[mtd]: root filesystem index=0
MicroBlaze auto-config flash probe(0x22000000,4194304,2): 400000 at 22000000
Amd/Fujitsu Extended Query Table v1.0 at 0x0041
Flash: JEDEC Device ID is 0xC8. Assuming broken CFI table.
Flash: Swapping erase regions for broken CFI table.
number of CFI chips: 1
cfi_cmdset_0002: Disabling fast programming due to code brokenness.
Creating 8 MTD partitions on "Flash":
0x00000000-0x00004000 : "Bootloader"
0x00004000-0x00008000 : "Bootargs"
0x00008000-0x0000c000 : "MAC"
0x00010000-0x00020000 : "Config"
0x0000c000-0x00010000 : "Spare"
0x00100000-0x00400000 : "Image"
0x00400000-0x00400000 : "JFFS2"
mtd: partition "JFFS2" is out of reach -- disabled
0x00000000-0x00400000 : "Flash"
MicroBlaze auto-config ram probe(0x241700b4,2621440,4): 280000 at 241700b4
Creating 1 MTD partitions on "RAM":
0x00000000-0x00280000 : "Romfs"
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
IP: routing cache hash table of 512 buckets, 4Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 4096 bind 8192)
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
VFS: Mounted root (romfs filesystem) readonly.
Freeing init memory: 52K
Mounting proc:
Mounting var:
Populating /var:
Running local start scripts.
Mounting /etc/config:
Populating /etc/config:
Clock: old time 1970/01/01 - 00:00:06
Clock: new time 1970/01/01 - 00:35:27
flatfsd: Created 4 configuration files (234 bytes)
Setting hostname: uclinux-auto
Setting up interface lo:
Setting up interface eth0:
Starting portmap:
Starting thttpd:
Mounting the NFS system
Welcome to
____ _ _
_ _ / ___ (_)_ __ _ _ _ _
'_ \ < \/ >
_ ___ _ > <
__,_\_______ _\__,_/_/\_>
_)
on Microblaze.
Developer: Chun Yeow, Yeoh on Jan 2007

uclinux-auto login:

Malaysia Football, Going No Where?

If you have ever had an opportunity to watch Malaysia play, don’t expect too much. This is my only advice to those who love the game. I considered myself a fanatic fan for local football during my early days, but no more now! I went to stadium to watch Penang play in City Stadium and almost all the matches involving Malaysia in Klang Valley. However, I feel sick each time watching them play in the stadium. Yesterday, it was a match between Malaysia versus Singapore in Asean Cup competition. I had managed to catch a few minutes of the match after coming out from the barber shop. My colleagues actually invited me to the stadium but I’m in no mood to go there. You won’t believe that after football turning professional for almost 10 years here. (The first professional league in Asia, but Japan does it much better than us in such a short time frame) Our national players still could not apply the basic skills, such as passing, holding and shooting the ball properly. Terrible!!! Our striker even balloons the ball without any pressure from the opponents. And until today, we still use the technique “hit-and-run”, too many long ball and too direct. This technique is not suitable for Asian team since we could not physically match the European players. Asian teams, such as Korea and Japan, have starting to look for new technique but Malaysia is far away behind. I promise myself if Malaysia enters the World Cup Final I will go to watch them no matter where. But it will not materialize if this is same team I watched yesterday! Look at the world ranking, where is Malaysia?

38 Iran
47 Japan
51 Korea Republic
111 Singapore
117 Hong Kong
126 Lebanon
135 Kazakhstan
137 Thailand
139 Kyrgyzstan
141 Yamen
144 Bangladesh
145 Sri Lanka
151 Laos
152 Malaysia

We are below Laos!!!! This year, we are going to hold the Asian Cup and again we qualify because we are the host nation, not based on merit. Is this going to be the same for World Cup Final? Lack of professional management in local league, majority of players with no attitude and desire, bias in selection of team players….. Malaysia football is going nowhere!

PIC & Technical Talks

I have written a simple NE2000-clone driver for the PIC16 micro-controller. The driver provides two mechanisms: Polling and Interrupt based packet reception. Polling is based on the observation on the two pointers in the receive buffer ring. Interrupt is based on the triggering interrupt signal coming from the Ethernet controller. This task is similar to what I have done for my master thesis. I actually transferred most of code from AVR Atmel micro-controller to PIC micro-controller. I found out that the PIC16 uses the 8-level deep hardware stack, thus overflow can be occurred after more than 8 nested function calls. At the same time, all RAM location required by a function are statically linked to a specific address at link time and RAM is reused for functions not active at the same time. So, no recursive calls are allowed. Quite different with the Atmel microcontroller which I have used before.


We had successfully organized two IEEE ComSoc Technical Talks at MCMC (12th Jan) and TMRND (17th Jan). The talk in MCMC was all about Cyberspace Security and MCMC will held a series of technical talks in this year. Dr Jeffrey Bannister spoke about the Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) and 3G IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), FMC and IMS will move current telecommunication system towards to a full IP based system. Peoples in Telco site have to start understand the network characteristic of IP instead of just 64 kbps time slot. I agree that the IMS is hard to deploy mainly due to difficulty of finding a business model which could benefit the content developer and also the network operator. Who should bear the cost if a content developer has developed a fantastic application and would like to put its application on the network operator site? The network operator argues that the content developer must pay for the service offered by him. However, the developer thinks that the operator is doing nothing and simply gains from the application that he/she develops. It is hard to push the IMS if there is no suitable content for the end user. A big pipe or high bandwidth is simply useless. This is the same story to 3G.

IL Divo Live in KL

A fascinating night in KLCC Plenary for “IL Divo Live in KL” with my partner. My dear had introduced this operatic pop vocal group to me last year. Thanks to my dear. I have their first and second album songs ripped in my notebook. The quartet decided to kick start their world tour 2007 in KL. I can’t remember how many songs had been performed yesterday. The entire concert took around 1 hour 45 minutes accompanied by a live band and small orchestra. They performed the song in Spanish, Italian, English and France with their powerful vocal. Songs such as “Hero” and “Unbreak My Heart” are performed not in English. Maybe that’s true that “Love is the same, no matter in which language”. But actually I can’t differentiate the songs in Spanish and Italian. My girlfriend was almost “out-of-control” at the end of the concert. Luckily, we sat in upstairs and were no-way near the stage. Otherwise, I think that she will even slap me if I ever ask her to stay calm

Submarine Cable

We had encountered severe internet congestion last two weeks due to earthquake in Taiwan. But my company also faced the problem on unnecessary packet transmission from the Internet Messaging Service (IMS). Statement below from Jame Seng clarifies my understanding on submarine cable. I first thought that the cable is laid under the seabed.

“Submarine cables are not under the seabed. It is just laid across the sea. It is only when it crosses major shipping lines and fishing zones (mostly near the coast) that it is lay (5 to 10m below) under the seabed. Therefore, it is not unusual for submarine cable to be cut, mostly due to deep-sea fishing”

Some pictures regarding the submarine cable route.....

5 things that you didn't know about me

Just saw that Sooth tagged me. Let's go straight to the point.

1. I am a right-handed guy but I do wear my watch on my right as well.
2. My grandma had to accompany me to the school for the opening week in kindergarten and also standard one. She had to stay until my class and brought me home. Why? My mum said that she can’t resist herself to see me cry in the class.
3. I won a badminton tournament without wining a single game. It was a team event in my company and I was field for the single and double against all the opponents. I lost all my matches but my teammates won the championship trophy for me. Not bad heh ;) After the tournament, my team manager said to me that I was “umpan” to other teams and he was correct! Thinking about Kwan Yoke Meng. Do you remember him? 1992 Thomas Cup?
4. The only subject which I failed in my primary school was Music. But I joined the school band in my secondary and played Euphonium (a kind of musical instruments similar to Tuba – small size Tuba). Eventually, I became the leader for the Euphonium group :)
5. I had never stayed away from home until the age of 18. The first outing was KL trip with my friends.

If we would like to have a deadlock, then I will tag Sooth back, but I choose to tag Sooth’s sister.

Travel to China

I was doing the most traveling hours in my life last week, starting from 16th Dec to 24th Dec and traveling based on the following routes:

KLIA --> [air: 4 hours] Guangzhou --> [air: 1 hours 15 min] Wuhan --> [air: 1 hours 45 min] Kunming --> [highway: 2 hours] Shilin --> [highway: 2 hours] Kuming --> [railway: 8 hours] Dali --> [highway: 4 hours] Lijiang --> [highway: 4 hours] Dali --> [railway: 8 hours] Kunming --> [air: 4 hours] KLIA

This trip was considered as part of my “fulfillment” to my dear. I was excited to meet her in Wuhan which she studied. I was having my first bowl of beef noodle in the winter season in a Muslim restaurant near my girl friend’s hostel. Spent two days in Wuhan and tasted a number of delicious foods, such as “Tang Pao”. Headed to Kunming and we went to Shilin, the “stone forest”. I was amazed with the beauty of the shapes and structure of the stones. Then, we headed to Dali and Lijiang in Yunnan Province and stayed in the old towns. I was not too impressed with these two old towns since they were purposely developed for the tourists. Huh…. I had to spend almost all my time doing window shopping in these two old cities. Lijiang old town is considered as the world's relic by the World Cultural Heritage Commission of the UNESCO. It is occupied by the Naxi ethnic minority. However, you will be surprised that you can even find the pubs and bars in this old town. You were experience the same staying in Dali old town which is indeed occupied by Bai ethnic minority. Back to Kunming, spent one-day time in the ethnic village and hanging around in the downtown before heading back to Malaysia.

My thoughts on China after the visit:
- A fast developed country better than what I have had in my mind
- A huge market to penetrate (when I saw the crowd in Carrefour)
- Not too difficult to find Muslim restaurants in Wuhan and Yunnan Province
- Prepare yourself to bargain all the time
- Prepare to do a lot of walking so better to travel to China when you are young
- Ask properly before you accept any offers otherwise you will be frustrated with the hidden cost and protection fares
- Bring your pen because it is hard to borrow from the peoples there
- Chinese there will always said that we are Chinese migrants but they forget that their government said that all the Chinese abroad are none of their business

Photos taken during the trip…

At the Wuhan Airport

With My Girlfriend

Lijian Old Town

Dali Old Town

"Tang Pao" at Hundred Years Old Restaurant in Wuhan

Hawker Stalls at Wuhan

Shilin

Dali Old Town

Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

Just recently installed the Open SuSe on my system. Now, peoples are working against it. Show your support and sign this petition!

http://techp.org/petition/show/1

Open Source Beer

Attention! We are moving into a whole new world, called “Open Source” world. Someone might think about other products. I am thinking of Linux of Char Keow Teoy. Anyone want to share his/her recipe?

Open Source Beer: http://www.voresoel.dk/main.php?id=70
with their Creative Commons License

You are free:
to Share -- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
to Remix -- to make derivative works

Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech", not as in "free beer".

KL Revisit

First time in my life that I can visit the Tourist hotspots during my office hours. Last Friday, there were guests from Korea and I was asked to bring them to visit KL. First, I brought them to KL Tower. For your information, KL tower is the property of Telekom Malaysia and all the staffs enjoy the discount. ^__^ But for foreigners, they have to pay RM20 for entrance. Upon the request from them, I also brought them to the national museum. It was my second visit this year. During my last visit, I still remember that there was Cheng Ho’s exhibition in the main hall but this time was “Ramadan Special”. At night, we had dinner at Fatty Crab restaurant. Then, we headed towards Petaling Street, the so called “China Town” in KL which I strongly disagree. They surprised to find out that there are more foreigners than Chinese there. The last destination was Bintang Walk. We ended up having coffee in Coffee Bean.

Field Testing

We have conducted the field testing on the Flat Plane Antenna, using Spectrum Analyzer and Packet Generator in the area of PutraJaya and UPM. The operating frequency is 5.2GHz and 5.8GHz. My colleague and I were asked to setup the antenna for receiving site and collecting the measurement in dBm with 5.2GHz and 5.8GHz center frequency. This antenna is a bidirectional type. When we moved the holder of the antenna away from the transmission site, the signal was lost. Anyway, I was not too aware of the antenna gain and loss of transmission line. According to my colleague who is in charge of the testing, the 10dB transmission loss will happen in every 1km distance. We made the measurement in 3 different spots, which estimation distance around 500m, 700m and 1km.

Tired, I had to drive the "Rusa" all the day......

Antenna for Testing

Bandung Trip

Arrived at LCCT from Bandung 6 hours ago.

Again, this was an opportunity for me to travel to our neighboring country. This trip was purposely to study the wireless solution in one of the leading company in Bandung, Indonesia. I have heard the prestigious Institute Technology Bandung before but hardly have any knowledge on the standard of Wireless technologies there. After visiting that company, I have been a little bit worry about Malaysia. Country like Indonesia, their government is putting faith on their own local company for providing their own solution, although they are not developing from the scratch. But credit to them since they are working hard to get the things done. Here, peoples are depending too much on foreigners’ technologies and seems reluctant to give opportunities to local peoples. I am sorry to say that the Indon guys are much better than us in terms of their work rate. I have had the time to talk to one of fresh graduate from ITB and he said that those who graduate from IBT are encouraged to go oversea for their study. I can say that his technical skill is much better than any fresh graduate from our local university. Sigh of worry! I can’t imagine but I think that I have to believe that Indonesia will soon overshadow Malaysia in technology if we do nothing.

I had arrived at the Bandung airport on Sunday morning. Stayed in Jayakarta Hotel and it is quite near to the city center. Bandung is famous for its textile industry. My colleagues and I had spent our time in Rumah Mode and Cihampelas Street (famous for its Jean) looking for some clothes and etc. It is a paradise for those shopping kaki since there are a lot of factory outlets there. During this short stay, I had found out quite a number of foods which are synonym to Chinese foods, such as CapCay, Siomay (Siu-mai in Cantonese) , Mie Dago (like watan mee here) and etc. Some of the interesting snacks are Durian with ice cream, Batagor (fish ball mixed with Taufu), Siomay ( ), Mie Baso (noodle served with beef meat ball) ….But if you are talking about hygiene, than you probably won’t dare enough to taste these! Anyway, try to understand what the peoples are saying is difficult, especially when the terms can be interpreted as different meaning, such as:

lumayan – jauh
bisa – biasa
ceker – kaki
pak – cik
….

Here the Photos

A View on Hill Site

Jayakarta Hotel

Rumah Mode - A Famous Factory Outlet in Bandung

Durian mixed with Ice Cream

Batagor - A Famous Snack there

They are selling rifles openly


Taking picture at Bandung airport

Too much assumption.....

Worked on the protocol stacks integration, combining both two signaling stacks, NBAP (Node-B Application Part) and ALCAP, with the user plane protocol, FP (Framing Protocol). The FP is resided in peripheral card with PowerPC core while the signaling stacks are both running in main card with Intel Pentium core. Both of these two cards use different operating systems, one is RTOS and another one is traditional UNIX-based OS. The channel cards are not ready and this coz the implementation work based on too much assumptions. It’s really difficult…

Welcome the New Comer

My sister gave birth to a baby last Saturday. Probably will pay a visit within one or two weeks time. Guess whether is a girl or a boy?

Last Week Activities

Technical talk about Inter-Vehicular Communication (IVC) was held in UNITEN last Wednesday. We have invited Dr. Daniel Wong, one of the guest editors from IEEE Wireless Communication Magazine for special issue on “Inter-Vehicular Communications” and his student, Miss Bhawani. There are many similarities between the ad-hoc networks and vehicular-to-vehicular communication. However, there are different problems faced in VANET, such as rapid changing of topology. The speakers addressed two important research issues, security and routing algorithm. More on IVC can be found here.

Last week, I have been assigned a temporary task regarding WiMax solution. This solution consists of three main boards: processor board, modem board and RF board, connected via passive PCI backplane. I am asked to reengineer back the processor board. This board comes along with Intel IXP425 network processor running Timesys Linux. Since the tools are not ready for the time being, I worked most of time identifying the mechanism for re-loading the binary. The board contains a 16M Bytes boot flash that is used to store the bootloader, kernel image and root file system. The bootloader, Redboot was successfully built using the available tar package. However, the linux image is not built for the time being due to the unavailability of Timesys SDK. The JFFS2 root file system was built using the buildroot by choosing the uClibc library which is smaller than the libc. I found out that this tool is really helpful and you can add any new modules to your root file system pretty easy. Anyway, you have to add all the necessary device nodes by yourself. The Abatron BDI2000 will be used to download the bootloader. Subsequently, the redboot contains the command to transfer the image and root file system via TFTP. There are 5 MTD partitions in the flash and thus the root file system is mapped to root=/dev/mtdblock/2. To ease the development phase, mounting the file system is done via NFS.

Name FLASH addr Mem addr Length Entry point
RedBoot 0x50000000 0x50000000 0x00020000 0x00000000
zImage 0x50040000 0x01600000 0x00120000 0x01600000
RfsLinux 0x50160000 0x50160000 0x00E60000 0x00000000
RedBoot config 0x50FC0000 0x50FC0000 0x00001000 0x00000000
FIS directory 0x50FE0000 0x50FE0000 0x00020000 0x00000000

Twin Tower at Night and My Recent Photos

These photos were taken at KLCC Twin Tower last Wednesday. There were 6 trainers from Korea coming to our premise to conduct the training. They eagerly want to have a look on our Twin Tower – a mega project by our desperate Dr. M. So, we spent around 1 hour time there and had a cup of coffee at Coffee Bean.....

UMTS LTE

Recently, our local mobile operators are busy of launching the 3G services and also the HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access). 3G offers the data rate of 384 kpbs while HSDPA offers a 2 Mbps. However, the current research on UMTS Long Term Evaluation are looking for more high speed data rate and can be considered as 4G after all. One of the major different of UMTS-LTE compared to the current 3G is the radio interface technology. UMTS-LTE applies OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) and not CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). If this is really the case and our mobile operators is going to shift to the new technologies maybe in 20 years time, then we all need to buy a new handphone again. Anyway, I am more concern about the research opportunities...

Attractive Peoples = Non-Productive

A light moment on the weekend....... what do you think :-)

Weekly Update - Working on BTS

Spent almost the entire week on the new arrival BTS system. Study the technical specification. Figure out the mechanism of message exchanging between the channel card and main controller. Try to understand the software resided in the channel card and main controller. Manage to dig out the information on how the information elements in the signaling message are applied to actual configuration of the modulator/demudalotor and encoder/decoder. This week, start to plug the visionICE emulator on the 8260 board and have to figure out the HRCW and correct memory mapping for SDRAM, EEPROM and Flash. After manipulating OR and BR registers, manage to inspect the original dumped image in the flash. Then, bring out the board with my own downloadable image. So, this will ensure the re-loading of the new firmware and software for future enhancement. Still need to figure out the correct flash algorithm since the part number of the flash memory used in the board is not available in the visionICE.

Watched the match between England vs Macedonia and I was not convinced with their performance under the new coach. Again, they failed to impress with too many long ball to Peter Crouch. If you have ever watched the England vs Crotia match on Thursday, you will then laugh at the disgraceful moment by Robinson. You won’t believe that he can let a back-pass to defeat him. Gary Neville scored his first international goal not for his country but for Croatia. He should be proud of that ;-) Hope that he will not do the same to ManU. But I am quite sure that Van dar Saar is not Robinson. See the EPL league table and you will find out why.....

Badminton Friendly Match

Yesterday, we had a friendly match in SRJK© Serdang 2. It was an invitation from Goi friend. I had met with one of ex-schoolmate who I used to play football with. He said that he just took up this sport 2 or 3 month time. Actually, he asked me to join him while we met at Maybank ATM machine. However, I lost his phone number which I stored in the handphone. So, each team was allowed to form 5 double pairs. I had been asked to partner with John. Keke… just to cover me up. We played really bad and made too many unforced errors. We lost the first game after leading 7-4 and were behind 13-0 in the second game. But all of sudden, we managed to steal the game beating them 15-13 after exchanging three services. Maybe we had not enough warm up before the match. Just an excuse…

1st pair – GoiBM/Dr Lee - Lost
2nd pair – GoiBJ /SL - Draw
3rd pair – Ronney/Lam - Win
4th pair – John/Yeoh - Draw
5th pair – Kelvin/LipNgee - Lost

It was really tough yesterday. At the end, our team lost. Maybe we are not used to play in a competitive environment ;)

Presentation at IEEE Conference

Did my presentation at IEEE conference on RF and Microwave in Palm Garden Hotel, PutraJaya yesterday. The paper entitled “Performance Evaluation of FP/ATM Integration in MPC8260” is discussing the effort of putting the 3GPP Framing Protocol in the Motorola SBC8260 supporting AAL2 SAR and calculating the number of simultaneous DCHs affordable by the system. I had been assigned to make the presentation at Microwave Photonic session, which is irrelevant to my paper topic. At the end, there is no question and no response from the attendee. Anyway, I had did my job.

Curry Sausage

Curry sausage, have you all heard about it before? I was amazed to find out that it has been listed as one of the 50 groundbreaking inventions in German History by Partner fur Innovation. So, what is curry sausage all about? It is just a bite-size pieces of sausage covered with tomato-curry sauce. Imagine that 800 million are consumed throughout Germany each year. I have tasted it before in Berlin, because it is cheap and yes it taste delicious. So, do you all think that we can make this as one of the popular fast foods here? The main problem that I think is probably getting the main ingredient, the “pork” sausage. By the way, Herta Heuwer is the inventor for this favourite fast food. She made this culinary dish in 4th September 1949.

Look at the picture of curry sausage. Would you like to taste it?

IEEE Teacher In Service Program

Spent the weekend in Mariot PutraJaya for IEEE Techer In Service Program (TIPS). This program is the initiative of IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB). The major purpose of this program is to increase the number of student in Engineering by facilitating the volunteer-teacher mechanism. This 2 days program provides the platform for me to contribute to my society based on my profession. We will be called out to be the presenter or “coaches” for future TISP presentation. A small number of teachers attended this conference and found out that the lesson plans are indeed very useful as part of their teaching materials. We have exposed to two lesson plans: “Building the Robot Arm” and “Design a Candy Bag”. The lessons are designed to provide an early exposure for any pre-university students to engineering world. We all have to think how to first meet the design specification, costing issues, testing method, redesign and etc. All of these lesson plans are carefully planned to use low-cost materials, not more than USD100. Besides, the organizer invited the Curriculum Development Center director from Ministry of Education and he has said that it is possible that part of the lesson plans can be included as Living Skill modules. Anyway, we believe that we should start in small scale or pilot projects first. Try out the lesson plans yourselves in www.tryEngineering.com

Mr. Doug Gorham gave TISP Introduction

I'm back

Back to work after 1 week off. The longest leave since I have joined this company. There are several peoples who I would like to thank; first, my surgical doctor, Dr. Khor, who had carried out my operation, second, my beloved gf who takes good care about me throughout the healing week, third, my family members, friends and colleagues who support me. Alright, time for work first.....

Sinus Surgery

I will undergo Sinus surgery tomorrow morning, taken the CT scan on last Saturday and doctor’s opinion is better to have the surgery. Hope that everything will be fine then. Need around several days to fully recover from the general anesthetic. Probably, expect some bleeding as well, hopefully not a heavy one. It’s quite funny that I don’t even care about medical insurance before. My agent pursued me to buy it last year. Thinking just to entertain him, I bought one and continued it for this year. Now, I found out that you need a GL letter obtained from the insurance company before you can make any claims. One thing that worth to point out is that the clinic would not want to accept the PM Care medical card. The doctor claimed that the company is yet to release their payment for previous patient.

Pressure on Ethnic Relationship Talks

" Greetings of solidarity and peace from Y4C!
This afternoon, we received a call from the Masjid management. He told me that they received the pressures from the authority for not rent the hall to our Alternative Course on Ethnic Relationship. We are very disappointed with such unnecessary and high handed ways to stop the civil society to conduct a rationale, mature and important discussion on the ethnic relationship. The government should encourage more open dialogue and discussion on the ethnic relationship. Instead of compulsory the course in the university, the government should allow Y4C to hold the activity in the hall. Although Y4C faced these difficulties, we will continue our program as usual. We are going to move to Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. "

I had received the email from my friend regarding the ethnic relationship talks which I posted last week. Alright, it mentioned that “pressures coming from the authority”. Who pressure the Masjid management? This is indeed a big question mark. I have attended the talk for less than 20 minutes last week. A huge crowd had turned up for the event. One SB just sat beside me and kept busy writing his notes. I won’t blame him since he was carrying out his normal duty. “Was it because of his report”, question mark again. Overall, I don’t think that the contents of the talk pose any threats to current authority. At the same time, it was organized in a peaceful manner with majority of Malay and Chinese participants. Our nation will celebrate its 49 birthday at the end of this month and to discuss those ethnic issues openly and academically under the roof of the university is banned. I probably believe that we are going nowhere!

Photo at Morib Beach

Photo taken at Morib Beach a month ago!

Ethnic Relationship

My friend, Khailoon, has recently setup a youth organization, known as Youth for Change (Y4C). Y4C urges the public to attend a series of activities for strengthen the ethnic relationship in our country. He threatened me that, “our friendship will end here if you are not coming for the first talk in UIA today”. Please circulate the news to those who are interested:

Venue: Dewan Masjid UIA Matrikulasi, Petaling Jaya
Time: 8.30 p.m. – 10.30 p.m.

4 Ogos 2006 - Dasar Ekonomi Baru dan Hubungan Etnik - Dr Syed Husin Ali
10 Ogos 2006 - Peranan Mahasiswa dalam Hubungan Etnik - Hishamuddin Rais
17 Ogos 2006 - Agama dan Hubungan Etnik - Prof. Osman Bakar
24 Ogos 2006 - Isu Bahasa dan Hubungan Etnik - Lee Ban Chen, Arumugam
7 Sept 2006 - Masa Depan Negara dan Hubungan Etnik - Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim

If you still believe, please come.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Mid-week

It has been sometimes since my last writing. Work as usual but not feeling well since Monday. Thanks, for my dear who take care about me. Bought two books from MPH bookstore last Saturday, and MPH is having “Mega Sale” now, up to 30% of discount. But I wonder how many books had been sold compared to clothes, shoes and etc. keke…

So, anyone who believe in this phase:

- “Anything that can go wrong, will."

I strongly believe that this is true. I always make a worst case assumption in my works or my daily life. Maybe it looks like a pessimistic approach. Actually, I just have a kind of thinking not to put too much expectation on others. You can put a huge pressure on yourself to deliver but not the same to the peoples surrounding you. Have they put the same amount of efforts as you? Unless you are a project leader or the one who pay their salaries, otherwise what else can you do?

- “If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it”

The above quotation is the Murphy’s Law and people have used it to relate to programming:

- “The difficulty of debugging software is directly proportional to the number of people who will ultimately use it.”

Hmm, I think that it should be written as:
The number of bugs to be found in software is directly proportional to the number of people who will ultimately use it.

So did you all read the news (www.thestar.com.my) today?

Bloggers beware
UNTRUTHS: If information in blogs, websites and online portals were incorrect, bordered on slander, caused disturbance or compelled the public to lose faith in the nation’s economic policies, their authors would be detained for investigation, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

Sooner or later those in the Ministry of Internal Security will have to design a Blog crawler. But probably they will seek help from Google. Keke……

Continue my work on STREAM IO…

Market Analysis

A market survey and analysis presentation from Frost and Sullivan on “WiMax” and “Wireless Sensor Network” were conducted in my company this morning. A hugely disappointment, nothing special and nothing new, the presentation was mainly for top management peoples without any technical knowledge. It seems that the presenter thought that the target audiences are all marketing peoples. It must be a joke! He said that he doesn’t know the operators in Malaysia which offers cellular service.

Well, the conclusion for his presentation:
WiMax – 802.16d (fixed) will be died and look for research in 802.11e (mobile and fixed)
WSN – ZigBee will be in leading position compared to the other standards.

ZigBee Protocol is similar to the one used by WiFi, known as CDMA/CA. Find out more from this web-site. Interesting stuff.....

Weekly Update

I had been robbed by a Chinese guy at SS2 this Monday. I lost my RM300++ and my handphone while my gf had her handphone “taken” by the guy as well. He came with his Wira and a knife. Without thinking twice, I just fulfilled his unexpected request. We had made a police report and gave our statement. Luckily, both of us were safe but what concerns me is the safety of our country. We can use all the excuses but it seems that Klang Valley is not safe. It’s hurt and terrible!

Studied the Real Time Linux used in the current market. I managed to incorporate the patches of RTAI (a community effort for open source developer) for my host system running 2.4 kernel. Just simply run the test suite but the system crashed if running LXRT processes. For those who like to try it out, get the patches, tools and test samples from this web-site.

This week was really busy. Migrated the BSPs for two different processor architectures from older version of Tornado to the current version in my company. Then, resume my works on Linux PCI. Today, I succeeded to add the PCI-to-Local DMA transfer in my IO call with interrupt driven mechanism. The size of DMA transfer is limited to only 128K bytes from my host system’s RAM to the local device.

That's all! Enjoy the weekend

Collaborative Citizen Journalism

How does this concept work? The advent of Blogging.. Anyone who would like to contribute can access the following web-sites:

OhMyNews - http://english.ohmynews.com/
WikiNews - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

Can we trust the news? How can a person make a judgment based on his/her limited knowledge and nowadays too much information access? No answer …..

Newstrust - http://www.newstrust.net/

Earliest Sign in Time 2006

Alright, I had signed in as early as 8:05:26 AM today. After fetching my gf to her school, I had started my “sleepy” journey to my office. Apply multitasking concept on my journey, reading the report, typing the SMS….. All my colleagues (in the same lab) kept asking me, “Tak boleh tidur keh”, “Mimpi awal”. Based on my previous record, the earliest sign in time was registered on 6 March 2003. Guess? as early as 7:37:00 AM!

Have a look on head-butted Zidance. :)

PCI & World Cup

Writing the PCI driver for two different FPGA boards embedded with PCI bridge chip for my current assignment. Doorbell Interrupt, Mailbox Registers, I2O FIFO, DMA…..blah, blah, blah. Based on my previous experience, I was able to complete the “template” driver for Linux platform within two days. But care must be taken to provide the mechanism for accessing the unique features which is not common across all the PCI bridge chips. Both of the PCI bridges come with different features. These are the tricky parts. A glance on our testbed for E1 testing:

After all, the finalists for this year World Cup are France and Italy. How come these two teams entering the final? Italy beat Australia with a late late penalty. It will not given by Graham Poll (English Referee). Again, they beat German with a late late goal with a beautiful curling shoot from a defender. It’s a bit of luck. France, almost knock up in early group stage, beat the World Champion, Brazil.

It was pity that German could not enter the final, anti-climax. I actually don’t favor German because of the way they play the game. I still remember that I had to sacrifice my sleep just to watch them converting the penalty in 1990. Anyway, under the guidance of Juergen Klinsmann, German starts playing attractive football with a lot of pace and attacking minded. Much, much entertaining compared to last time. Hmm…there was a debate on the first choice goalkeeper during the start of the tournament. Oliver Kahn or Jens Lehmann? At the end, the long term No 2 became the No 1 and long term No 1 became No 2. Could this happen in our country? It was strange and unacceptable from Kahn’s point of view. Lehmann did say that he didn’t know the reason why he had edged out Kahn. My personal view is that Klinsmann would like to challenge the mentality of his squad and intend to reform the German football. I heard today that Lehmann is willing to offer his starting place to Kahn. Just wonder whether Lehmann will do the same if German enters the final.

Registered my second level of German course yesterday. Borrow three books (stufe 1) from the library after librarian persuaded me to do so.

World Cup Quarter Final

Today and Tomorrow Quarter Final:
England vs Portugal
France vs Brazil
Germany vs Argentina
Italy vs Ukraine

My prediction for the semi-finalists:
England vs Brazil
Germany vs Italy

Both Portugal and Ukraine haven’t won the World Cup before. So, I won’t think that they are good enough for this competition. Germany plays a very offensive style compared to the previous tournaments. They seem to pick up the momentum when times go on. However, they need to overcome Argentina which is full of talented players but always tumble in the last hurdle, same as Spain. Anyway, I believe that Germany stands a better change with home ground advantage. Unless Pekerman is brave enough to start with Messi upfront. This young talent with one or two magical moments can shape the game. Then, I pick England again. Sven and Scolari, who is better? The records favour Scolari’s team. But with Rooney in England team, everything is possible. He probably will make a big impact in the coming match. Boring tehnique but if they win, who care! Don't forget the Greece plays boring game in Euro 2004. Ukraine simply doesn’t have enough experience against Italy. With all the old folk, France is going nowhere. Even Brazil plays under par, they can simply overcome France. So, what’s your prediction?

One of two World Cup theme songs which I received from my love one, “times of our lives” from Il Divo and Toni Braxton

there was a dream
a long time a ago
there was a dream
destined to grow
into a passion
a fire within
a will to give everything
a desire to win

for the lifetime of heartbreakes
that brought us here today
we'll go all the way
It feels like we're having the time of our lives
Let there be sunshine let it rain
Let's come together as one and the same
Cause it feels like we’re having the time of our lives
We'll find the glory in the end
For all that we are
For all that we are
For the time of our lives

This is the moment
This is our chance
To do what we love and to be
What we're ment to be

for the lifetime of heartbreakes
that brought us here today
we'll go all the way

It feels like we're having the time of our lives
And I'll never forget
For as long as I live

Time for my new assignment!

Weekend Approaching....

Hardly have time to write my blog this week. I was able to solve the problem for my E1 board on Monday. Combine eight 2MHz data stream into one 16MHz data stream. Thanks God. By observing the Logical output from the PC-based logic analyzer on all the channels, I was able to understand my system and trace the correct pattern. Have a view on the diagram captured using the logic analyzer. Further verification has been done using the pattern generator developed by my colleague.

World Cup Update…. All the group matches will be ended this Friday. No Asian teams had been qualified for the knock-out stage for the time being, unless you want to include Australia. Australia joined the AFC and will be part of the Asian Family. Just to improve their changes for the next World Cup qualification. Saudi Arabia and South Korea both will play tonight. South Korea stands a better change for knock-out stage provided they can beat Switzerland, a draw simply not good enough. France will beat Togo, a team surrounded with players’ payment problem. Just hope that at least one Asian team makes it.

Countries qualify for the knock-out stage:
Germany – Europe
Ecuador – South America
Argentine – South America
Netherlands – Europe
Portugal – Europe
Mexico – North America
Italy – Europe
Ghana – Africa
Brazil – South America
Australia – Ocean
Spain - Europe
Ukraine – Europe

Couldn’t believe it if there is no Asian team in the Last 16…..

Finally, receive my German Language result from my teacher, Frau Lenz. I managed to score “Gut”. For your information, mark given in Germany is as listed below:

1 – sehr gut (very good)
2 – gut (good)
3 – befriedigend (satisfactory)
4 – ausreichend (sufficient)
5 – ungenügend (insufficient)

You must score at least 4 to pass your examination. Not bad… Yeh

Endlich

Finally, I finished my German EI level by sitting the Examination on Saturday morning. The day after German had won its group match, 4 – 2. Vemal said that we should have the luck since German won that day. The exam is composed of five sections: Listening, Comprehension, Writing, Grammar and Dictation. Each section takes about half an hour. The most difficult part for me was the Listening section. It was a conversation between an interviewer and a student about her study, living and etc. I hardly understand what they are saying and making a lot of wild guess. But quite confident that I can at least pass the exam and moving up to EII which will starts during the end of July.

Now, I had to wake up early on Saturday and Sunday morning since I have to be more discipline on my life now. FYI, I usually have my lunch as my first meal on Sunday. Anyway, I am willing and more than happy to do so. The answer is simple. Girl can make a guy change! Keke…..

I only managed to watch the match between England and Paraguay. Not an interesting match in my opinion. England seems desperate to field Wayne Rooney in the upcoming match. They need the inspiration from him. Tomorrow, there will be a match between South Korea vs Togo. Hope that Ji-sung and co. play well. Iran was beaten yesterday 1-3 by Mexico. How about Japan today?

Or “desperate” former PM said that his press statements are hardly seen in newspaper nowadays. Then, I heard from my colleague that he has a Blog. But I couldn’t find it in Google search engine. Anyone knows that? Perhaps, he also had his blog been googlewashed! He should be felt sorry for himself…..

Mid-week

Received a new E1 board and started my task on providing the correct setting for interfacing with baseband module. We have managed to bring up the previous E1 board but due to the limitation on the development tools, it is hard to modify the firmware to suit to our application. I am delight with this new E1 board since the development tools, such as the user interface to the chip, the portable device driver, the scripts and etc. are more powerful compared to the previous E1 board. Once we are able to solve the system interface, then we can start putting up more features for our product.

I am invited to join a sharing section on “football mania for upcoming World Cup” in Dema house. I don’t know why they asked me to do so. I just can talk about all the players, staffs, issues, and many others associated to my beloved club, Manchester United. :)

Alright…. List all the venues of the upcoming World Cup, which cities that you love?

Hamburg
Hanover
Berlin
Gelsenkirchen
Dortmund
Leipzig
Cologne
Frankfurt
Kaiserslautern
Nuremberg
Stuttgart
Munich

I will pay most of attention on the following teams:

South Korea, Japan, Iran, except Saudi Arabia - Carry the Asian hopes

England - Watch too much EPL, and recognize all the players

Netherlands - I love Total Football, and I love their Orange color!

That’s all….. Hmm… a lyric to share with you all, a Scottish folk song, recommended from the one who I love. Hope to share the rest of my life with her!

When I've done the work o day,
And I row my boat away,
Down the waters o Loch Tay,
When the evening light is fallin',
And I look towards Ben lawyers,
Where the after glory glow,
And I dream on two Bright eyes,
With a merry mouth below,
Shes my beauteous nigh-ean ruadh,
Shes my joy and sorrow too,
And although she is untrue,
Well I cannot live without her,
For my hearts a boat in tow,
And Id give the world to know,
If she means to let me go,
As I sing hee-re, ho-ro

Nighean ruadh your lovely hair,
Has more beauty I declare,
Than all the trasses fair,
From Killin and Aberfeldy,
Be they lint white, Brown or gold,
Be they blacker than the sloe,

They mean not as much to me,
Than the melting flake of snow,
Her dance is like the gleam,
O the sunlight on the stream,
And the song the wee folks sing,
Oh, they're the songs she sings at milking,
But my heart is full of woe,
For last night she bade me go,
And the tears begin to flow,
As I sing Hee-ree,Ho-ro

Light Moments

Attended a patent drafting seminar in Menara TM on Monday. It was my first experience to be in 50th floor of Menara TM, my parent company. The training is conducted by an oversea firm. Anyway, it is not easy to understand all the presented contents and materials. Reading the material is similar to reading the terms inside a contract. Conclusion from the patents drafting seminar is “Any inventory must not based on the hindsight”. Dilbert's comic strip to share....



I found a good web-site for those who like to take up German language.

And if you feel boring and want to test yourself on the maps quiz although I don’t find this interesting!

I can’t stop laughing with this Dilbert comic strip. If you can punch anyone in your office, that’s great!!!!!