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