Can we have a much, much better Sejarah syllabus, please?

For quite some now I've been reproachful about the way Sejarah was taught when I was in secondary school. I absolutely hated the subject at the time, but especially after university, I find myself wishing frequently that I learned the history of my country in a more meaningful way. As opposed to memorising tons of facts without comtemplation and questions, and going by the "heuristic" of "them bad, we good. As in, we good." (You know what that emphasis is for.) And other propagandistic stuff. You know, it's even scarier that most people don't even realise there are propagandistic stuff in the textbooks years after they graduate.

Call me a defeatist or whatever, but I can't even find the energy to start elaborating why I feel this way. I'm sure many of you know why and probably feel the same way. (OK OK, that makes only one of you.) Well nothing sums it up better than this article, "Learning Malaysian History: A Lopsided Formula" written by John Lee for Education in Malaysia. Great read. And I hope for my child's sake that the Sejarah syllabus be given a long-belated overhaul.

In the meantime I'm reading up as much as I can, so that I'll be able to at least give my child a clearer picture when she has... questions. Especially the awkward ones. I hope I'll be able to give her some answer that makes sense from a historical context instead of a lame "sorry kid, that's how it is..."

After all, that's the whole point of History, isn't it?

I want a cubicle like this!

Google engineers are having lots of fun building various stuff both decorational and functional, out of giant Lego-like blocks called "Bloxes". These are

"interlocking cardboard boxes that were something like giant legos that connected on all six sides. They ... were originally intended to be used to build flexible workspaces (like easily morphable cubicles)."

Here's a cubicle office with an attached lounge area:

More photos here. Gee, I wish I could have a Blox cubicle. Can I? Can I? What? No funding? Dang.

C'mon, Tajel!

Awwww c'mon, Tajel! LaTeX has lots of goodies for the Humanities, too!

Formatting Large Hard Disks with FAT32

I badly needed a new external hard disk. My boss gave me one of 150GB — in NTFS.

Darn. I hardly use Windows these days, only GNU/Linux and Mac. And WinXP wouldn't let me format it to FAT32.

Darn darn darn.

Until I came across fat32format. All I did was to issue at the command prompt

fat32format e:

and the hard disk was formatted in, like, what? 2 seconds.

*Blink*.

Wheee!!!

EOL character conversions

I need to inspect/process large text files (mostly dictionary data) on a regular basis, and for a quick preview I'd use the trusty less. But one thing nearly always drives me crazy: end of line (EOL) characters.

So what's up with all the EOLs? Read all about them.

Luckily since I'm working on *nix systems anyway, there are nifty little utilities, nay, bash commands that'll do the EOL conversions in a blink.

For conversions between DOS files (CR-LF EOL) and *nix files, use dos2unix and unix2dos. (Or use sed if you're old school, as shown in this Linux FAQ HowTo.)

On the other hand, if you need to convert Mac files to/from *nix files, try out this trick with tr, or awk, or perl.

And finally, if you also need to convert between character encodings/sets, you might want to use the versatile recode utility instead. I use it all the time now since I need to process multilingual dictionaries very often.

Transitional and Strict DOCTYPEs

Every now and then, I write some HTML with some CSS thrown in. I'd insert the ol' XHTML DOCTYPE directive, but I'd never bothered validating my code (aaaarrghhh you sinner!!), nor finding out about the differences between Transitional and Strict DOCTYPEs. Well, I just found out today when I came across this article, extolling why we should go Strict (and CSS).

Picasa Albums in Facebook

A while ago I was finally egged on by Hussein to get into Facebook. I was really reluctant at first, since I'm quite skeptical with most other social networking sites (except LinkedIn, which sorta has a more career-oriented feel to it and hence, feels less "adolescent" — sorryyyyy, didn't mean to offence!).

I was pleasantly surprised once I joined. Apparently Facebook's new interface was already in operation when I joined, so all my user experience only applies to the new Facebook. Clean interface, useful tools (non-obtrusive friend invites, people-you-may-know), etc.

I had only one gripe though. I've already uploaded tons of photos (mainly of my baby) to Picasa Web Albums, and was loathe to re-upload them to Facebook. Now there should be Facebook apps to embed/link Picasa albums in my profile/wall, right? Right. Only that they don't work with the new Facebook.


Today I finally found a new Facebook app, Picasa Tab, that actually works.

It pulls all your public Picasa albums into a Wall tab, and displays the photos right inside the Facebook interface, unlike the other apps which would actually redirect you to the Picasa website.

Viewers can even comment on the photos right in Facebook, although these comments won't be updated through to Picasa itself, as the app author wanted to keep Facebook comments more private.

The only caveat right now is that you'll only get a photo still for videos, but I guess that's asking too much for now. :)

US election day on Facebook

The whole world is watching eh.

iGoogle haz new lookz

iGoogle's just got a new look yesterday:



The tabs are now all lined up at the left of the screen, instead of across the top. This is quite alright if you have a wide screen, but for people like me who's got smaller resolutions, the screen real estate has really shrunk. Each widgets may now be "maximised" to fill up the whole content frame, like the Google Reader widget in the screenshot above.

My first impression: Whoa, it's like launching a new applications when you maximise these widgets, and something like a preview when you only expand them. Hmmmm... is Google going to make this into its own operating system? Y'know, do everything online, forget about installing OSes locally on your own machine and be tied to it?

UPDATE: iGoogle gives a tour of its new features.

New fun stuff from Google.

Google Chrome. Ooooh. Me like.

PicasaWeb update with face recognition and name tags. Ooooooh. Me like. (Yeah yeah I know Flickr had it ages ago...)

Geeky Fan Girl!

My colleagues, Sara and Gan, recently went to a Web-related conference in Singapore. Anticipating that Google and hence Dr Lee Kai-Fu would very likely be there, they took along a couple of his books (including my own copy of 《做最好的自己》 "Be Your Personal Best") to see if they could get his autograph.

Guess what? They got it! (The Google stickers and bookmark were from Google's exhibition booth. I thought at first Dr Lee had a Santa's sack with him to hand out Google goodies wherever he went...)



They told me Dr Lee was pretty surprised to see people bringing books "all the way to Singapore???" (he thought they were from Taiwan initially) just to get his autograph. Well Dr Lee, it's so rare to find someone who combines the best of both worlds from the Western "go-getter" attitudes and Oriental "ethical values of integrity and humility", and is happy to share his views on the younger generation. After reading your book and articles, I know that I'm not "stupid and naive" to want to do things my way all the time.

Wanted: Suggestions for Superheroine Moniker

(I know I've said before that I'd post all baby fluff in the other blog, but she's just too cute for words and I really want more people to see her, even if it's really just one more...)

Needing the service of a superheroine? Look no further than me, the... er... ah.... hmmm. I need a superheroine moniker. Any suggestions?




Hush. I just sneaked into the enemy's secret hideout and trying to find out where they're keeping the hostages.




I hear a scream! Hang on, I'm coming!




You ain't getting away, you baddie!




Take that! *POW* *SMASH*




Another day, another baddie in the garbage can. I'm off!

Aging Laptop

(Just to remind anyone who wants news of Hui Ning, my new daughter — head on to my other blog. And if you decide to venture there do be aware that there might be TMI at times...)

My Fujitsu laptop's showing symptoms of age, even though I've only had it for about a bit over two years. Then again I showed it no mercy, using it for >16 hours per day frequently, coupled with the temperature in M'sia...

Bottomline is, the fan refused to work, even at startup, about 2 months back. I get a loud beep at boot-up and an erroring declaring that the fan system is off. I was trying to knock off some projects before the baby arrived, so I continued using the laptop anyway. It probably wasn't a good idea. A few days back I found that after about 30 minutes of usage (without air-conditioning), the graphics card seems to go all wonky: in Windows, the screen just froze. I restarted the machine, and I see vertical stripes interspersed with the usual BIOS startup splash. In Debian though, X.org seemed to work OK, but come shutting down time, the console messages are a bunch of garbled text.

Uh-oh. Sounds like some stuff are getting fried. Back-up time. And only use the machine with air-conditioning on when it's absolutely necessary (like uploading Hui Ning's photos and videos, heheh.)

Then today, immediately on startup, the vertical stripes were already there in the BIOS startup. Windows is rendered unusable as even the login screen can't be displayed. Debian though... ok so the startup console messages look like some pig-latin encrypted code, but in due time X.org starts up fine and I'm here writing this blog post while backing up whatever else I should be backing up. (Why do I feel like writing "We cannot get out. They are coming. We cannot get out."??)

This laptop goes to the service centre tomorrow — hopefully we're not too late.

Welcome, Baby Hui Ning!

Baby Hui Ning 慧宁 arrived roughly a week earlier, at 12:58pm on 30 July 2008. My water broke around 6a.m., so I guess my labour wasn't too long for a first child...



I'm still pretty exhausted (and time-constrained!) to blog much -- you know the drill ;-D In the meantime, here are some photos.

38 weeks

Until I saw myself on film I had no clear idea how big I've actually become....

1.5 weeks to go (assuming we're following strict due dates) :D !

Double Yolk

I was making a quick snack and out popped this twin of a egg into the saucepan. (Sure, call me kampung to even want to blog about this.)

iMac in the house

After the desktop PC conked out yet again (the power supply this time), we've had it with PCs and Windows.

Result: We went out to Sunway carnival and got a spanking new iMac.



We love it. Lotsa things to explore.

Now we've got three OS'es in the house. BTW the wallpaper there is Semicolon from Vladstudio.com. (Also, the panda didn't come with the Mac...)

Here in My Home

Nice song. Fun video (and I don't just mean identifying the personalities without looking at the credits). Soppy and too-good-to-be-true dream, though. Yes, I know I sound cynical. But I can't help the warm fuzzy feeling (and the sour cynical feeling) after listening/watching this.

The MP3 and QuickTime video can be downloaded for free at MalaysianArtistesForUnity. So go on, watch the video, download the mp3, embed the banner/video in your website/blog, spread the word. If only because it's a nice song.



Update: I badly needed a LaTeX fix, so I re-typeset the guitar chords (original .DOC version available at the site above). The LaTeX-ed guitar chord + lyrics sheet can be downloaded here.

Update 2: This is weird. My baby kicks whenever I play the song. HARD. Yes sweetie, mommy hopes that this'll be a good home for you too. A better one than now anyway.

Attack of the Sudden Visiting Researchers

(This is the last in a series of ranty posts, about the events of a particularly... "exciting" week. Yeah, I hear many sighs of reliefs — or is it just one since I really only have a readership of one? )

'Twas the morning before the ScienceFund project presentation, and I was waiting for CC to come to the lab so that I could set up the demo system on his laptop.

When suddenly...

Mr T appeared and told me to quickly come to the office, 'cos the main office just made a surprise call saying that a team of visiting researchers from a Thai university are coming down to each of the labs, so, yeah, get ready to receive them and show them around.

"When's that happening?"

"In, uh, like, 5 minutes' time."

Well thank you Main Office for the short notice. Though I guess everyone forgot everything else with the ScienceFund projects for the last one and a half weeks, so it's probably unfair to blame them.

Receive the visitors, eh. (And then what?) Mr Tan the word was to brief them about the research we do. Sure, get someone to talk, but we were in a bit of a fix: Dr T wasn't around. Dr R wasn't around. I was the only RO around in the lab at the ungodly hour of 11am (hey everyone was exhausted the whole week scrambling for the presentations and reports). Mr T had already dragged out Dr S, but she's into linguistics and not really crazy about the "computational" part — and on seeing me she said "Oh good, you're here. You can do the talking then."

Ack.

Then I remembered about the brochures for last year's open day, and luckily we still have a few copies lying around in the office. And then it's scurrying back to the lab to hopefully find a big enough space for 7–8 people to huddle around a computer monitor (Dr S' suggestion) and to hopefully locate some online demos that we can show (Dr C from next door's suggestion).

They came.

I gabbed. Tried to gab. Then showed them the online machine translation prototype, the multilingual lexicontology (yeah it's a mouthful, but the real project name is even worse) and the (not quite reliable) sense tagger.

Surprisingly the visitors were deeply interested (and even impressed with the sense tagger)! The questions they asked showed that they were no strangers to NLP. They even left name cards (which I yet again embarrassingly told them I didn't have one since I'm a mere down-trodden RO. ) En A who escorted them around said that of all the labs visited thus far, this lab was the longest time they spent.

On a side note — En A (sorta cluelessly) remarked that this was also the most run-down/unimpressive (something to that effect, dunno the exact word used 'cos this was re-told to me later by Mr T) lab they've seen that day. To which Dr S retorted "Well this is the lab where the people do real work!"

Microsoft Office 2007 to support ODF?

If what's reported in this PC World article is true, I'd be so happy. I can then happily work away on OpenOffice and e-mail them to all the other Microsoft Office users without converting them and getting a bunch of tables and bulleted lists wrangled in a the process!