PHP & CGI

Move on to write a PHP script for accessing the IO in my board. I have previously done the same thing using the CGI script. I still don’t see any major different between these two scripts since I just did a really simple thing. Both of them can be incorporated into the tiny web-server, thttp. Yes, PHP has rich set of features but comes with heavy price. It consumes 4M of memory space compared to 66K of memory space by CGIC library. Need to further strip down the library size.

Asian Cup Quarter Final in Bukit Jalil

Went to Bukit Jalil Stadium to watch the match between Iran versus South Korea yesterday. The original ticket price is RM30 but I bought two for RM40 from a guy who claimed the he get the tickets from Astro. My girlfriend seems a little bit nervous when we entered the Korean camp due to a “big” turn out of Red Korean supporters and all sorts of noise created by them. It’s hard to feel such an environment during the matches involving Malaysia throughout this competition. Estimated 40,000 fans on match 1, then 20,000 fans on match 2 and then dramatically decreased to 2,000 fans. Malaysia Boleh! Yesterday, I saw different attitudes coming from both Iran and South Korea supporters. They kept on cheering their players, shouting their player names, even though they made mistakes or wasted a golden scoring opportunities. There is nothing wrong to give your players encouragement but why we Malaysians always boo our own players whenever they made mistakes. Perhaps, we are not so keen or so patriotic. No, easy, they lack fighting spirits!

A Korean supporter sat beside us offered us the yellow colour Kiwi fruit. He found out that we are Malaysian. He managed to speak one two simple sentences in English, “Malaysia plays very poor. However, they play very good last time, same as Korea. Such as, Soh Chin Aun”. Again, same old story, how long should we keep on memorize those golden days? Are we not competitive enough now compared to those old generation? I don’t think that the problem solely comes from the players and the coaches. Our government should take the blame with its inconsistent policies, not for the peoples, but policies to serve their own interests so that they keep on winning the next election.

Regarding the match, both teams are very cautious at the beginning. South Korea missing several key players from European leagues plays a counter attacking game with only one striker up front. Iran with its more senior and experienced player deployed a short passing game and attacked from right flank and from the middle. However, shoot on target in the game was really low although both set of players fought for almost every ball. A disappointed match! 120 minutes without any goals. If either team would score, probably we would have a change to see a more attacking and entertaining match. Iran coach brought in the substituted goalkeeper at last minute for penalty. I had a feeling that they will lose because I still remember that England brought in Carragher and he was eventually the one who missed the penalty. So, South Korea to the semifinal on Wednesday and we will see their supporters roaring out “Taehan Minguk” again. Felt sorry for Iranians that some of them have to travel back after more that one week stay in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia, Boleh, Semua Boleh, Apa pun Boleh!

Did you hear any bloggers in this world ever been caught by police official under OSA? Yes, Malaysia has one ….. If we are the first to do this, then we probably can be proud of this! “Malaysia Boleh!”

Then, I heard the news that T.M.P. resigned from his post, but how about our FAM president?

Who should we blame?

“What a shameful display,” said the visibly upset Tengku Abdullah, according to the official Bernama news agency.

“I apologise to all the spectators and want to shake their hands. I am truly disappointed with their inept display.”

“The coach has the power to choose the players and he should know better.

“Only the coach and players will be able to say what happened that night. I was also a spectator,” said Tengku Abdullah.

So, who should we blame? Who appoint the coach? Who select the players? Who.....

I expect FAM to sack the coach, reform the team by temporary dumping the senior players and selecting youth players, prohibiting the foreign players from playing in local league, forcing the players to take the fitness test, changing rules again and again for local competition, at last…. still going nowhere…..

Whipping Boys

Sometimes, it just hard to believe, but you have to accept this. Originally, I planned to go to the National Stadium in Bukit Jalil, but ended up at Mamak stall near my home. Watching our national team played in Asian Cup Final, not upon merit, but as one of the co-hosts. Before the match, I had a strong feeling that we were going to do well in this match after Vietnam and Indonesia defeat their opponents and Thailand draw with mighty Iraq. I was wrong again!

Vietnam vs UAE 2 -1
Indonesia vs Bahrain 2-1
Thailand vs Iraq 1-1
Malaysia vs China 1-5

Before the start of the match, the Malay fellow who sits beside me said, “Selagi bapa dan anak Pahang tu menerajui FAM, bolasepak kita tak ke mana”, “MyTeam yang pilih anak kampung main lagi bagus”. Then, after China scored the 2^nd goal, he said, “itulah, ada pemain Cina kat Penang yang bagus, tapi tak pilih”. I considered it as a racist comment. After the 4^th goal, another Malay fellow said, “Itulah, semua Melayu kat padang, jurulatih itu pilih pemain tengok bulu”. Again, a racist comment…. Suddenly, Indra Putra scored a spectacular goal outside the penalty box. “Macam dah menang perlawanan”. Our coach actually brought in Nanthakumar as central defender after we conceded 4^th goal.

Agghhh, I could not hide my frustration that our players play very poor, especially our defense. We do not have enough quality to do well. Our central defenders are too short and physically very weak compared to our opponents. China is not tactically gifted team compared to Japan or South Korea, but they can trash us five goals. I wonder how are we going to survive from the remaining matches…..

What our coach said...

“This was not a good start for us. We tried to match the Chinese team, but there were times when the Chinese were able to keep possession and when they did we tended to lose our discipline in terms of keeping our shape.”

“The game plan tonight was to try and stop the crosses but as the game went on and China continued to move the ball, then we lost our shape and that is why there was room on the flanks.”

“With the quality players China have, we tried to have a positive approach and to match them not individually but as a team. As they progressed though, when one individual lost his concentration it impacted on the team.

“There were occasions in both halves when we attacked and we played more as a team. There was more urgency in the second period. Unfortunately though there were lapses of concentration.”

By the way, do you know our coach name?

Penang Bridge

Recently, travel back to Penang with my girlfriend. It was my first trip back after Chinese New Year. Entering the Penang Bridge, and all of sudden, wonder why I need to pay RM5.60. My mum said that if I don’t have Touch N Go card purchased near the bridge, I may pay RM7.00. I found out that the bridge is now under construction. I think that it is probably for expanding the bridge from tow lanes to three lanes. So, pay more after that??? I thought that as Penangities, we should pay less whenever we travel back to our hometown. Just curious for those who stay in Butterworth and work in Penang. I believe that paying RM7.00 is too much and how can you afford that everyday.... even in KL, I don't pay that much.

SMS Spoofing

There is a series of stories related to SMS Scam in Screeshots. If you would like to find out yourself whether you are unnecessary charged by our Telco, you should check your bill. I have not asked for a printed bill from Celcom, have to do so….

Read these two stories:

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2007/6/14/technology/17966950&sec=technology

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2007/6/14/technology/17966950&sec=technology

"Our parent company is worth RM3bil and we have a reputation to keep. Do you think we really need the extra cash from spoofing?"
- If you can earn more easily, why not?

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....