BN and Fake University?

One BN candidate claimed that he obtained his PhD at American University of Hawaii.

Penang Economy Downturn

If this is true, then it’s sad that we have to do this to attract the foreign investors. I am really sad to see my home state has to do this. The federal state should help but not by such a way. If this is really our “Malaysian” style, then why we need to spend our money developing our human capitals? How many projects are we able to award and offer to? So, if Intel wants to pull out from Penang, does the government need to launch a campaign to promote Intel chipset or force our government officials to use only Intel’s PC. If we do sincerely develop and give equal opportunities to all Malaysian, I strongly believe that Malaysia is good enough to produce talented Engineers to attract foreign companies to setup their not only their manufacturing factories but also R&D center here. If Dr. Koh is doing this, is this mean that he is not getting enough support from the federal state and starts to “assimilate”? If then, should we blame him? The question now is that whether the next CM in power will have "free hand" to run the state.

Motorola Media Press
Malaysiakini News

Another interesting article to share:
Penang pays the price of success

General Election

So, this is so called a fair General Election by our EC.

Go to the SPR website and check the following:
T715511 and 670104075529
T719756 and 750909035727

Is this mean these voters can vote twice in two different areas? Is this fair?

I think that you know the answer.

If SPR does develop a "semakan pengundi" with better search capabilities, perhaps you can find more the above cases. But my colleague said to me, "What to do?"

AppWeb

If you would like to try out the embedded web server in your system, I would recommend the AppWeb. In my humble opinion, it is much better than others embedded/tiny web server. The server is scalable and modular with dynamic loaded modules. Come with features, such as SSL, User Authentication, Embedded Java Script, CGI ….. The most important is that it can support multithreaded environment. In single threaded environment, the PHP script can execute in long time and stall the server. This happens to my previous thttp server.

Start Deutsch A2

Ich bin sehr glücklich, weil ich meine Prüfung bestanden habe. Aber mein Ergebnis ist nict gut. Ich weiß nicht, wie ich meine Deutschstunder weitermache. Ich hoffe es. Vielleicht, nächstes Semester.

Tragedy

Choi Yo-sam was officially declared dead. Still remember this... So, who next ....?

Trip to Wuhan and Beijing

I had made my “winter break” this year in China again. Travel to Wuhan to meet my girlfriend on 20th Dec and made a trip together to Beijing. Travel back to Malaysia on 30th December. It was my first visit to the capital of China and a good opportunity for me to have a look on Beijing before the Olympic game in year 2008. Visit Beijing is almost like reading a history book since there are so many heritages there. We had to start our day as early as 7 a.m. everyday so that we can cover almost all the attraction points in Beijing. To my surprise, the ticket prices for the subway is rather cheap, only 2 Yuan or RM1, including the transit. However, traffic in Beijing is quite congested even in “non-peak” hour. One of taxi drivers told me that Beijing is going to implement the rule that car on the road will eventually based on the first digit of its plat number during the Olympic game: odd digit for Monday, Wednesday and Friday while even digit for Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Walking upon the lake was indeed a new experience for me. The weather was so cold in Chengde that even the lake was frozen over. My girlfriend was busy with her shopping stuffs until the very last minute before we captured the flight back to KL….

Travel route:
KL --> GuangZhou --> Wuhan [20 Dec] --> Beijing [23 Dec] --> Chengde [25 Dec via Train] --> Beijing [26 Dec] --> KL [30 Dec]

Some of the places that we have visited during our stay in China:
Wuhan [武汉] :
Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuchang Revolution Museum

Beijing [北京] and Chengde [承德]:
1st Day: Yonghe Temple (雍和宮), Beihan (北海) and Wangfujing (王府井大街)
2nd Day: Forbidden City (故宫博物院), Jingshan Park (景山公园),
Tiananmen Square (天安门广场), Dashilar, Liulichang
3rd Day: Chengde Mountain Resort (避暑山庄)
4th Day: Puning Temple (普宁寺), Putuo Zongcheng Temple (普陀宗乘之庙)
5th Day: Temple of Heaven (天坛), Prince Gong's Mansion (恭王府)
6th Day: Great Wall – Juyongguan (居庸关), Ming Dynasty Tombs (明朝十三陵),
Xidan (西单)
7th Day: Summer Palace (颐和园),
8th Day: Zhongguancun (中关村)

Some of the restaurants that we have visited:
Café Sambal – Malaysian Cuisine, Peking Roast Duck at Quanjude (全聚德), Sizzler, Annie’s Café – Italian Cuisine, Lao She Teahouse (老舍茶館), Sizzler …. etc.

My advice is that visit there when you are young and when you are physically capable to cope with a lot of walking.

Yellow Crane Tower (黄鹤楼)

Forbidden City

My GF at Starbucks near Beihan

Yonghe Temple

Wuchang Revolution Museum

Wuchang Revolution Museum

Ming Tombs

Chengde Mountain Resort

Chengde Mountain Resort

Peking Roast Duck at Quanjude

Tortoise for Long Life at Forbidden City

Kirin

Summer Palace

Summer Palace

Old Peking Dish - 驢打滾 at Lao She Teahouse

Happy Birthday

My girlfriend was born on this day!

3G

When one is doing nothing, another one tries to get it and do it. Our government said “NO”. The question is that why you give the license to someone who you know is not capable to do it at first.

Exciting 3G offers from DiGi in 2008
DiGi not guaranteed to get 3G spectrum licence
MiTV on track to deliver 3G network [But who see it? Service Provider or Content Provider?]

* Time dotCom is partly owned by Khazanah Nasional Berhad with percentage of shares 30.04% at 30 March 2007

Wireless Distribution System for 802.11

If you would like to extend the coverage of your WiFi network, you could apply the Wireless Distribution System (WDS) bridging feature that could be found in most of the WiFi chipset. I have connected two Access Point (AP) using WDS to extend the coverage of the network. 1st AP contains single wireless adapter and one Ethernet adapter. Another AP consists of dual wireless adapters. The 802.1d Ethernet Bridging kernel feature is enabled in the kernel while the bridge utilities is installed. The WDS feature must be enabled in both AP so that 4 address format used in 802.11 header can be handled.

[LAN] ---- AP1 ----- [WiFi] ---- AP2 ---- [WiFi]

Here, part of the commands for enabling the bridging between two different interfaces:
# brctl addbr br0
# brctl addif br0 ath0
# brctl addif br0 ath1
# ifconfig br0

As usual, extending the network comes with the price of increased latency and decreased throughput. 802.11 header overhead is increased by adding two additional MAC addresses. The following MAC addresses are needed to ensure the success delivery of 802.11 frame crossing two different APs:
- MAC for the sender
- MAC for the final destination
- MAC for the sending AP
- MAC for the receiving AP

[AP1]
Ping statistics for 172.16.6.1:
Packets: Sent = 9, Received = 9, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 3ms, Average = 2ms

[AP2]
Ping statistics for 172.16.6.1:
Packets: Sent = 9, Received = 9, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 5ms, Average = 3ms

Try it out if you could have two WiFi cards in your PC.

ICIAS

There was an IEEE conference in KL Convention Center organized by UTP. I had made my presentation on “Real-Time Reconfigurable Embedded System for Remote Monitoring and Controlling” around 2 p.m on Tuesday. I rushed to the conference at last minute from my office. Since a lot of presenters are come from hardware design background, so the questions from the audience were mainly to clarify their personal understanding. This paper is intended to propose a NMS system using soft core processor in FPGA with real-time capability. It is grouped under the VLSI and Embedded System category. I also attended the training on “Hardware Design Exploration for Embedded Computing Systems” conducted by Dr. Pramod Kumar Meher from NTU. It’s great to learn some tips and hints on the hardware design, such as pipelining, and etc.

For those who are interested in MicroBlaze processor, a new release version (v7) comes with MMU support, so it is possible to use Linux instead of uClinux.

Public Transport

I was asked to attend a training at Maju Junction Mall in Jalan Sultan Ismail for the last three days. Since the venue is located in center of Kuala Lumpur, I decided to take public transport instead of driving. I parked my car at the nearest Taman Jaya station and this cost me around RM3. Then, take the Putra LRT to KL Sentral cost me RM1.60. Huge crowd and you almost have to wait for 6 minutes. Lastly, I had to take KL Monorail to Media Tunku and this cost me RM2.50. So, the total cost for going to and back from my training is RM11.20. Too much….

But I really could not accept that such a short distance costs around RM2.50 for taking KL Monorail. Furthermore, it was a bad experience on the first day while the train stuck for almost 5 minutes just before it reached Media Tunku station. Yes, there was no complaint from passengers including me. This remembers me that once I almost missed my bus back to Penang when the KTM stuck at KL Sentral for almost 30 minutes. Pricing for petrol is going to raise next year after all our Ministers keep making noise that our government could not further subsidy. More and more peoples will start taking public transports. But “Suka-Suka”, it can simply delay your trips so who are going to trust our public transport?

SIP Testbed with WiFi Phone

This testing was conducted before the unfortunate things happened to my brother.

I had the opportunity to setup the SIP phones testbed in my office. It was not too difficult as first I thought. A lot of information can be gathered from the internet. I choose the openSER SIP Server since it was initially developed by German Institute ;-). I setup the phone call within a local area network. All the IP nodes are connected behind the NAT (Network Address Translation) device. Using SIP Softphones, such as Ekiga in Fedora machine and Linphone in SuSe machine, I managed to make a phone call after setting up the SIP server. But to my surprise, the quality of sound is not as good as I think. Then, I tested with two WiFi IP Phones from Linksys. Hmm… the quality of sound is as good as the normal GSM phone. I did a quick check on the Codecs used by the WiFi phone. Two ITU standards Codecs are available: G.711 and G.729. G.711 is the 64kbps high bit rate codec with no compression similar to the regular phone. G.729 offers toll quality speech with a low bit rate 8kbps but require more CPU processing time. I couldn’t get the ADSL modem and phone line with streamxy support at this moment. Then, by using a PSTN gateway, a SIP phone can call to any regular phone in our homes. But until now, no testing is conducted. Based on the documentation, the openSER SIP Server with additional tools can support all the above services. I found out that the handover of the WiFi phone is a bit frustrating. Although it can auto-detect the neighboring Access Point based on the configured network profile, but you always need to wait for about 5 seconds before getting the IP address and also re-associate with new Access Point. Perhaps, mobile IP can solve this issue. While you are in the middle of your conversation, you will probably lose you counterpart’s voice when you are switching from one AP to another AP. If you have more control on your network and APs, I believe that we can solve this problem. Much works to do!

Time and Life

Almost 4 weeks after my brother passed away, but I still feel the pain of losing him. During this period, I have received quite a number of calls, SMS and also supports from my colleagues, friends and relatives. Thank you. If I could do it, I would like to personally thank everyone. I believe that I will be strong enough to take up my responsibility.

Anyway, I reserved my special thank to my special one; my girlfriend who is always with me throughout my difficult time …

This email was from my Indonesian colleague:

I feel sorry about that and I can share the emotional feeling because for me also even though my brother died many months ago but I also still feel sad. But those thing going to happen to all of us and we have to prepare it and I believe the life in the next world much more joyful.. rather than this world May God the Mighty Who His Mercy encompasses everything pouring His abundant Love n Mercy to your brother and all of us...

Sincerely Yours
Hadi S

"You cannot control time. What you can control is your actions"

My Brother - 楊駿鴻

My brother passed away on 4^th October 2007 due to car accident. I could not accept the fact when I first heard the news in the early morning. Until today, I still miss him. He was such a lovely guy to me. Never ever say “no” to me whenever I need him. Although we are totally two different characters, we have had a lot of good memory in the past. A lot of peoples said to me that it was a fate, but I just wonder why two of my family members leave me in such a way…..

All I can do now is to ensure my mum lives happily for her remaining life…..

This was the last SMS message that I received from my beloved brother:
"I got diving trip to trang, thailand. For my diving advance license. Mom not yet know."
25-Sept-2007
21:14:16

He never ever had the opportunity to do so....

Rotiboy in South Korea

Rotiboy opened 6^th outlet in Seoul. Why choose Korea? I don’t know???!!!!

Rotiboy @ Jongro-Gu,
246-2, Kwanchul-Dong, Jongro-Gu
Jonggak Station Exit No. 5

http://www.rotiboy.com/

Trip to South Korea 大韓民國 and not North Korea 朝鮮民主主義人民共和國

I had again traveled to South Korea or Republic of Korea after the last visit two years ago. I still remember that I started this blog after coming back from that trip. A “three days two nights” trip was always too short and it likes going back to my hometown on weekend. My advice to those who would like to travel to Daejeon: Not to take any transit flight unless you have plenty of time to spend during the transit.

KLIA -> Shanghai Pudong -> Cheongju

We had only two hours for the arrival and departure procedures at Pudong airport before catching the flight to Cheongju. Luckily, I am able to speak Mandarin and immediately asked the official to let my colleagues use the special counter to avoid the crowd. Huh…. then, we also need to fill up the Immigration forms and Customs declaration forms. We should fill them in-flight but the flight attendant said that we are exempted. A mistake! My colleague lost her luggage at Cheongju Airport because the MAS official informed her that her luggage will transfer directly. Another mistake!

At Daejeon, I stayed in the Spapia Hotel, a 4-start hotel which was the accommodation for the Korean national football team during the match against Italy. See the picture. About 2.30 p.m., I met Poh Kit and then we traveled to Seoul. The KTX train which can operate at speed of ~300km/h took us approximately 1 hour time to reach Seoul. See the map for the distance between Daejeon and Seoul. My colleague used to say to me that “Daejeon is north of Seoul” because he turned the map upside down. Thanks to Poh Kit, I managed to spend sometime around Insa-dong (仁寺洞) and Deoksugung (德壽宮) Palace. Yes, Seoul is easy to travel around since there are 8 subway lines. The next day, I had my usual task to complete with a short visit to ETRI for meeting and discussion. Then, my colleagues and I travel from Daejeon to Seoul and stayed in the Itaewon (梨泰院洞). For those who are Muslim, you can find a number of Muslim restaurants there. But to my surprise, the price of a Kebab costs me around 10,000 Won, approximately RM38, more expensive than the Korean dish I had before. We spent 2 hours time at Namdaemun (南大門) market and I bought two umbrellas for my girlfriend. Wie viel kostet Sie? 10,000 Won per umbrella!

Here, some of my observations during my short stay in Daejeon and Seoul:

• Restaurants offer free plain water with no additional charge. I use to drink more than 10 cups of plain water in the Muslim restaurant.
• There are helpful peoples in Seoul. A middle-age man helps me to get a taxi after quite a number of them refuse to fetch us to Itaewon. Reason? I don’t know since they kept waving the hands!
• Cost of living is too high for Malaysian to live there unless you earn there.
• Daejeon is not so happening compared to Seoul.
• Raw crab is one of favorite dishes in Korea. I saw an advertisement promoting a sauce for raw crab and teaching you the method of eating the fresh crab.
• Snooker is one of the favorite sports for women in Korea. You can watch the games in ESPN channel.
• In Itaewon, you can see American soldiers and a lot of Korean police officials. There is an US military base nearby.
• Toothbrush and toothpaste are not provided free in the hotels.
• The security check in Incheon Airport is the strictest. Don’t bring any liquor more than 100ml per container. My colleagues said that he can bring out his peanut butter from KLIA and even Shanghai Pudong, but not Incheon Airport. He lost his peanut butter and canned drinks.
• [Extra] Rotiboy can be found in Seoul
  

Daejeon - A Clear Sky on Arrival Day

Deoksugung Palace

Deoksugung Palace

Namdaemun

Subway - PK

Mosque at Itaewon

Police Station at Itaewon

Signature of Player in Spapia Hotel: Hwang Sun-Hong

He scored the goal againts Poland. First match First goal in WC2002 for South Korea

Cheonggyecheon stream (淸溪川), Seoul

Cheonggyecheon stream

Namdaemun Market, Seoul

The Shopkeeper selling Ginseng who knows to speak a little Malay. You can find my business card in his shop.

Google Lunar X Prize

The Google Lunar X PRIZE will be awarded to "the team that can soft land a craft on the Moon that roams for at least 500 meters and transmits a Mooncast back to Earth. The Grand Prize is $20M until December 31, 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15M until December 31, 2014, at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation."

Thinking of joining this competition?

Xenomai

Do you ever think of making your Linux system a real-time or deterministic system? I have done some works before with RTLinux and RTAI. But if you are looking to migrate your current real-time system such as vxWorks, pSOS, uITRON, to Linux, then you should consider Xenomai. It offers quite a number of OS skin. I have patched and tested the Xenomai on my AT91 board featuring ARM920T processor. I even tested a vxWorks application on it. But yes, you have to tolerate some latency delay compared to RTAI.

Tribute to our Baby-Faced Assassin

I went to see the fireworks at PutraJaya on Merdeka eve with my girlfriend and few of her friends. Travel as early as 7 p.m. to PutraJaya and reached there about 9.30 p.m. I though that the fireworks would start at around 10 p.m. but it was delayed till 12 midnight. The fireworks performance took around 25 minutes but it was pity that we couldn’t hear the music. It was a terrible traffic when trying to get out from PutraJaya and we stuck in the traffic for almost 2 hours. This was first time I experienced such a scenario in PutraJaya. As you know, there is not much traffic whenever I travel to PutraJaya for my badminton games.



Last week, one of my favorite players in ManU announced his retirement after battling so long against his knee injury. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer….. A moment of happiness keeps flashing back when he put the ball in the net at last minute of the European Cup final against Bayern. Good luck, Solskjaer!