Interesting Points of Interest

Exodus

2011-07-19T23:30:00.004+08:00

For now: http://pushypanda.byethost32.com/
In a few hours' to a few days' time: http://www.pushypanda.com

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Interesting Points of Interest - Lift off!

Reality Leaves A Lot to the Imagination

2011-07-05T23:34:00.014+08:00

The post title is a quote widely attributed to John Lennon, and I think there is a lot of truth to it. Don't talk about how Physics and Math govern the world, we are talking about reality. Reality is what we think we know or what we choose to believe.

There have been many times when I'd be driving and signaling to change lane when the guy on that lane but behind me speeds up and seemingly occupies the space I am aiming at. Some people might jump to the conclusion that that guy is being an aweonao, but it could just as easily be that he is speeding up to allow me to cut in behind him.

At this point, I can either choose to believe that he is an aweonao, which might lead me to believe that most people are aweonaos which might lead to a life of bitter lemons, or I can choose to believe that he is a nice guy who I would probably forget about in no time (we only remember the bad guys, right?). It turns out that I'm still undecided and therefore I can't forget about that guy and the many others like him.

However, I do think that during traffic jams most people become aweonaos by not giving way, especially to allow cars stuck behind the accident vehicles to cut in. Really, if everyone just opens up some space from the car in front and let one or two cars in it might ease the jam a little. Then again, there could be some non-aweonao reason why people choose to bumper-tease the car in front during jams, but I can't think of any and so my stance is pretty firm on this one. But I digress.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt starts at home, really. I think this goes without saying, but, the majority of us probably go through life with absolute trust that our relatives, and at the very least our immediate family members love and care for us unconditionally. Well, I dunno if the majority feels that way, I can only speak for myself. Most people probably love their parents very much and they won't hesitate to tell you so, but I don't know if they can believe that even if they murder someone, their parents will either not believe that they did it or they'll believe that you had a very good reason for doing so. In fact, I'm open to the idea that not even my parents will give me that benefit of the doubt, but I just feel that they will, and that gives me a lot of comfort in life, especially given my strong interest in being involved in organized crime, for example becoming a Jehovah's Witness!

Well now, that's something isn't it, a religion that's outlawed in first and second world countries. The Jehovah's Witnesses is an idea that was recently introduced to my mind. While on holiday in Denmark, Kooty and I met an Icelandic gentleman who shared with us a little info about Jehovah's Witnesses. Remember the times a few years back in Singapore where young people would keep coming up to you trying to get you to join their church (now they're selling insurance, same tactics, different boss). Well this guy was nothing like that. All he wanted to do was to make us be aware that we may or may not be going to hell if we don't believe in God. But it was a very interesting conversation and I ended up interviewing him instead.

So he started off by praising the peaceful park where the Old Town of Aarhus was at, and I made a comment that parks like that are the souls of cities. We made a little bit of small talk before he expertly guided the conversation to biblical proportions. His grand message was simple: signs are showing that the world is ending and we are going to hell unless we believe in God. Of course my first instinct was to think "what a load of gilipolleces".

And so after going through some of the literature giving statistics on volcano eruptions, disease, and stuff like that, he was prepared to let us go on our merry way. But I was not done with him.

Me: Do you really believe that all these events are proof that the world is ending?

Him: I believe in some of the bible, but not all of it. I think it is possible that these events could be a coincidence or it could be better technology leading to more of such incidents being reported in the media.

Me: Why are you spending so much of your time, away from home, in a park, waiting for strangers to come so you can give them your message? What are you trying to achieve?

Him: I just want people to be aware of the possibility that the world is ending and that they could be saved.

Me: Did any church or organization send you out here?

Him: Yes, in fact our organization used to be banned in Russia, some of my friends have been to jail.

Me: OH! You are a Jehovah's Witness! You guys are banned in Singapore too! So what about all the other religions? How can you decide which one to believe?

Him: Most other religions teach similar things which are good for society, like love, respect, and peace. We are no different. However, we believe that all other religions are created by the devil.

Me: Well... maybe such intolerance is why your religion is so hated and banned in some places.

Him: If you think about it, almost all other religions make the same claim. It just takes a bit of... guts to say it. We are also forbidden from serving in the military.

Me: Ah, I actually think that's one of the main reasons why you're banned in Singapore.

Him: All we have done is try to spread messages of peace. We believe war is evil, and for trying to show people such, governments, controlled by the devil, put us behind bars. Well, what can ya do?

Me: I don't know about the devil part, but being jailed for associating war with evil and hence not wanting anything to do with it does seem a tad harsh...

The interview above has been greatly cut down because it took place almost two months ago and I can't remember a lot of the things he said. What I did notice is that this guy is a pretty sensible thinking fellow. He didn't draw a fish skeleton to convince us of his ideas, unlike some other groups of people! Don't be fooled by all the devil talk, he was merely telling us about the religion he belongs to and, according to him, they really do think the devil is behind a lot of the world's stuff. And since he is part of the religion, he must state it as fact. But if you recall, he let slip that he does not believe everything in the bible. He is open to the possibility that the world may not be ending, furthermore he also did let slip several possibilities that he is open to that debunk the religion.

So it all comes back down to why was he spending so much time there, telling us and undoubtedly many others about things that he does not really believe. I can safely assume that I will never know the answer, but I walked away from him thinking that he is really there to show people how to open their minds to the same extent that he can believe in something that he doesn't really believe in.

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Interesting Points of Interest - What is this post really about?

Brain Defrag

2011-06-22T01:32:00.006+08:00

SO last semester (I split my life into semesters now) I had taken on so many projects, I had files of different versions for various projects stored all over the place, and I often had to work on multiple things at the same time which is impossible therefore I ended up working on something for a few minutes then changing to the next thing for a few minutes before switching back or switching to another thing. This resulted in a highly fragmented memory space. I'm talking about my brain here, oh but the same could be said about my hard disk and RAM of THREE computers.

What happens if you don't defragment your hard disk for a long time? Your data will be stored in so many different physical locations on the hard disk that your computer would slow right down. At least, that is what they tell me. Same goes for your brain. At least, that is what I just told myself.

SO as you are probably aware, I went off on a little holiday to defrag myself. It didn't work out as well as expected, partly because I had to do a little work while on holiday, and also partly because very soon after I got back I had to have sleepless nights again. And so here I am, still trying to defrag while fighting against a wave of work. What I mean is, I still feel burned out.

SO shamefully I admit that during the past week, I spent more time playing (L.A. Noire, Assassin's Creed II, and Fallout: New Vegas) than working. So here's my take on the games I played haha:

L.A. Noire is pretty good at first, the gameplay is pretty innovative and the graphics are quite nicely done, and the voice acting and character animation is really good. It all makes for a pretty immersive experience, but it gets repetitive after a while.

Firstly, if you thought that since it's a Rockstar game that it's gonna be like Grand Theft Auto 4 or Red Dead Redemption, that's your disappointment there, but you only have yourself to blame for not doing your homework. While GTA 4 and RDR are huge open-world games with tons of side things to do, LAN is a huge open-world game with almost nothing to do except follow the main story, which is solving crimes (you are a policeman), and maybe join a few gun fights and car chases along the way.

There is no "Secondly".

The innovative part of the game I suppose is the quite detailed animated facial expressions, which is quite important for you to tell whether a suspect or a witness is telling the truth, holding back, or lying. Well, the animation really is well done and I heard they did motion capture of real actors to achieve that, but the cues are pretty obvious in the end.

Probably the most fun thing to do in LAN is TRY to hurt people WITHOUT KILLING THEM though cos once you kill someone that's game over and you have to restart or load. You can also try to wreck your car or other peoples' cars but they will never explode. You can also commandeer other peoples' cars. Another "naughty" thing to try is to get to and leave crime scenes and other locations without your partner. Your partner always follows you around and while in the car with you he'll talk about the case, so I dunno, I suppose it's fun to try and piss off the game mechanics by not allowing that to happen. Oh, also try and kill your partner. He is surprisingly tough, took me like twenty high speed car collisions to render him dead and the game over.

I ended up turning to the next two games to get my fix of open-world games.

Assassin's Creed II is a pretty awesome game that is twice as awesome as Assassin's Creed I. If you like parkour, fighting, climbing, tomb raiding, house keeping, and conspiracy theories, this is THE game for that, with a huge game world too. Plenty of fun things to do, but can't think of many "fun" things. Well, you can kill random people I suppose but it's more fun to try and knock them over or make them drop whatever they're carrying. Can't wait for Assassin's Creed III.

Fallout: New Vegas is your typical post-apocalyptic post-Interplay Fallout game. First, I think the new (post-Interplay) Fallout games do a good job of preserving the atmosphere and style of Fallout, though gameplay is quite different, mainly due to the fact that Fallout 1 and 2 is isometric view with turn-based combat while Fallout 3 onwards is 3D with real-time combat. The combat system of Fallout 1 and 2 was actually very strategic and a lot of fun and it's something I miss. Character development is quite comprehensive like the original games though I think the original games had more character development choices. Also, very ambitious of the new developers to make such an immersive 3D game world, where almost every item can be picked up and manipulated.

The game world of the F:NV seems much less buggy than Fallout 3, the first post-Interplay Fallout game, though the quest system still contains bugs here and there. Can't really fault the developers though, because this game is known for the highly complex interactions of the player with the game world and the characters in it. Almost every decision and action you take affects many other options in the future, which affects the states of many other things in the game world. I've almost come to view these kinds of bugs as a hallmark of the new Fallout series. Don't let the bugs scare you away though, patches do get released and also if you play it on the PC (which you should) you can often fix them by downloading scripts or entering commands in the game. What I want to see in the next Fallout game is working vehicles!

The future of things to come goes something like this. I'm gonna manage my time better, which is going to be something like, do something constructive in the morning, and when my brain juices are flowing, do work in the afternoon, and finally play my heart out in the evening. Regarding the constructive things, for starters I plan to create a new website to replace this blog, and I will move some of the more meaningful posts over. I want to try my hand at those Content Management System thingies rather than to use Blogger. Well we'll see. Maybe the next time we see each other will be at a totally new cyber-location!

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Interesting Points of Interest - Weird Al' just released a new album - Apocalypse

Northern Life

2011-06-04T03:27:00.014+08:00

I managed to go a whole month without a single post to this blog! Now that I've proven that I can do that, I'll get back to posting regularly. I hope. It was a crazy month, and June doesn't look promising either. But half of May was crazy in a good way.

Well when I say crazy I don't mean craaaaaaazy. I just mean that it was different from normal. That's because Kooty and I went to Scandinavia for a very last-minute hastily planned holiday, just like all our other holidays.

The plan was to land in Copenhagen, go straight to Legoland in Billund and spend a couple of days there, then head out to nearby Arhus and spend a couple of days there, then fly to Oslo in Norway and spend a few days there, then overnight-bus to Stockholm in Sweden and spend several days there, and finally back to Copenhagen to spend even more days there before flying home. And we did just that, everything went according to plan.

Denmark

If you want to know about Denmark, you have the entire internet at your disposal to read up about it. What is said online is generally correct, though I'd like to dispel a few misconceptions that Danes are unfriendly, stuck up, or whatever. We were treated by the locals very warmly as if we were familiar to them, much like how pigeons in Trafalgar Square are not spooked by humans. Oh that is a very bad analogy, I'm not saying that Danes are like pigeons. Maybe I should say "much like how the geese near Churchill Park in Copenhagen are not spooked by humans". That's not good either, if I want to refer to them as birds, I should refer to ourselves as an animal too. Oh what a hole I have dug myself into.

A statue that is afraid of geese

Legoland, Billund

As I was saying, so we went first to Legoland, a land where everything is made of Lego except the trees and plants and real buildings for humans and real food for humans and real humans. Legoland is a place that is not like any other place, except maybe the Legolands in California, Germany, England, and soon in Florida and Malaysia as well. The exhibits are statues, vehicles, buildings, villages, cities, towns, castles, Star Wars scenes, world landmarks, life-sized animals, and weird offbeat scenes like three Lego people staring at a Lego ice-cream that has fallen on the floor. These are sights to behold and when you're hungry, head on down to the Old West section called Legoredo where you can have steaks, hot dogs, coffee, and The Big Chicken Menu.

Crime scene

Århus

Århus (pronounced like or-oos I think) is a very big small town with lots of shopping and lots of sightseeing. It's also where we had our first and second Chinese meals in Europe and I must say, we should have learned our lesson and stopped at the first. Thing is, we didn't want to keep eating bread and hot dogs but we also didn't want to spend a fortune at proper restaurants. At least the two Chinese meals were buffets, or should I say "to make things worse" instead of "at least". We are a business-friendly blog so I shall not name and shame. You know who you are, Long.

Århus shopping street

Then we took a Ryanair flight out from Arhus airport. I've only ever flown SIA all my life, and I think once on American Airlines and once on Thai Airways. Point is, I've never gone budget. Now you're thinking I'm gonna open a can of shit on Ryanair but you're wrong, it was actually a pleasant experience. Maybe we were lucky to escape without incident, seeing as how there are so many unfavourable horror stories on the net and even a few controversial news reports.

The most complained-about practice of Ryanair's is the charges for check-in baggage and the supposedly strict enforcement of carry-on baggage limits, that if you exceed the carry-on baggage weight or size limit, they will force you to check your bag and impose a hefty fine. Well, we had one grotesquely shaped bag that wouldn't fit the size limit but it was allowed onto the plane.

The flight itself was amusing. We were greeted by Gloria Estefan's Rhythm is Gonna Get You when boarding, and after take-off the pilot forgot to turn off the seatbelt sign. Then when there was turbulence, the pilot announced that he was going to turn on the seatbelt sign and then he proceeded to turn it off. And being by far the shortest flight I have ever taken, before I could finish laughing, we were landed in Oslo, the "most expensive city in the world" as described by the pilot.

Free in-flight entertainment by the captain

Oslo, Norway

Oslo is expensive. Most things are so so expensive. A sandwich typically costs S$10, and a 500ml bottle of water S$5. Water and soft drinks are almost the same price, but beer is sometimes cheaper! But if you shop at the supermarket you can get most things cheaper than convenience stores. For our trip, Oslo had two main things going for it - food and a really happy city.

Food

Remembering some TV programs I saw on Asian Food Channel, I recalled that monkfish is really really good and you can get it in Norway, and you can also get whale meat in Norway. Let me tell you, monkfish is the meat that they eat in heaven, and whale... not quite. ~~Whale well~~ Well whale may not be that bad, just that the whale dish we had was a kind of almost raw slightly smoked slice and it's a bit like eating a slice of cold raw beef I think. We also had smoked reindeer and reindeer stew. Reindeer meat tastes really good. Ostrich meat tastes like the farm, with all the dung and animal smells, whereas reindeer meat tastes like the natural forest where animals are allowed to roam free and wash in the streams.

Whale - Better eat them before they go extinct! Just kidding!

Happy City 1

We had just left the monkfish restaurant when we caught sight of a balloon animal flying up into the sky, and then another one, and another one. We discovered that it was a bunch of middle eastern or maybe Mediterranean um youngish men holding onto a huge bunch of these balloons and making a lot of noise. The bahooligans or balloohigans, we called them. But they seemed nice, giving out balloons to young children whenever they walked past one.

Happy City 2

So then we were just walking on our way to this Askershus fortress in Oslo when we came upon some police horses and a police marching band, and there was a sleigh carrying at least three generations of what seemed like just a random family, and there were like a dozen more people gathered around. Soon, the horses and the band formed up and they paraded through the streets of Oslo playing pop music! It was a pretty long march around what must have been at least the entire city centre, gathering more and more people along the way, stopping traffic, and turning heads wherever we went. Finally, we got back to the starting point where we observed the members of the parade and their families starting on a barbecue. On our way out of Askershus fortress, we met an old lady who was associated with the band and she told us that they only did this once during Spring and once during Christmas. The next day, we saw the marching band at it again!

Happy City 3

So we were just walking along in the city centre looking for a toilet. Toilets are a problem in Scandinavia as they're hard to find and most public toilets require payment. Anyway, we were walking when we came to a plaza with another marching band playing but this one wasn't marching. And there was a lady dancing to the music, and it was a very graceful flowing happy dance. Looking at her, it showed me what true happiness probably is, something that comes from within. Something else was also coming from within me, and we had to leave in a hurry to look for the toilet.

Oslo - Better than Disneyland!

From Oslo, we took an overnight bus to go to Stockholm. I stayed up for as long as I could for the 7 hour journey, hoping that the northern lights would grace the skies. But it was not to be, and expectedly so I guess because the season, location, and midnight sun made it virtually impossible to see the northern lights. There wasn't much scenery to look at either. The parts of Scandinavia that we visited this time did not have great scenery, nothing compared to New Zealand. However, the impressive sight of Stockholm soon came into view.

Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm

We were excited about going to Stockholm because we had been living in virtual squalor thus far. Affordable hotels in Scandinavia are not easy to find if you want decent non-hostel conditions like a private bathroom and clean linens and towels. However, we found this quite affordable (relatively) studio apartment hotel which was very well kept and even had a kitchen, right outside the heart of Stockholm. We spent the least money in Stockholm because we ate almost all our meals in the hotel - buffet breakfast in the morning included with the room, and cheap supermarket food cooked in the comfort of the room. The city of Stockholm is also very beautiful and that is about all I can say. Oh, Stockholm is also home of the World's Largest Ikea but I found nothing much of interest there. Just the same old furniture and mundane objects, though I did like the vegetable soft toys in the kids' section. Oh and we also had a drink in the Icebar.

Icebar is a pretty cool guy.

Copenhagen, Denmark

How time flies for we find ourselves back to where we started, in Denmark, but this time in Copenhagen. It was back to virtual squalor but one good thing was that the hotel was near the metro station, S-train station, and purportedly the largest shopping mall in Denmark. We didn't really do much in Copenhagen. The two main things we did, apart from frantic last-minute shopping for souvenirs for co-workers, was visit the town and castle featured in Shakespeare's Hamlet and have the most expensive dinner of our lives.

Hamlet

To be or not to be. That is the most famous line from the play Hamlet. It is about Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, and is set in the town of Helsingør which is called Elsinore in the play. In the play, the Prince of Denmark lives in Kronborg Castle, the Danish royal castle, in Helsingør. The ghost of Hamlet's dead father, the former King of Denmark, appears to Hamlet and reveals to him that the current King, Hamlet's Uncle Claudius, murdered Hamlet's father. And in the end everybody dies. Seriously.

Kronborg - Everyone has a little dirty laundry.

Dinner

This was a six course meal at a Michelin starred restaurant, and every course, from appetizer to dessert, was like Christmas Day for the taste buds. Every aspect of each course, the taste, texture, portion size, temperature, was weighed to perfection, and the ingredients used in every dish, which included chicken hearts, snails, lamb, garfish, oyster leaves, three types of asparagus, and many others, were so varied yet complemented extremely well. I have to say this cos the meal cost 200+ of our best Singapore dollars, but it honestly was a really good food experience. The meal was described as traditional Danish cuisine re-interpreted in a modern way, or something like that. What's more, just in case the six courses are not enough, there is also a free flow of bread and very very very lovely great-tasting zesty cheese dip and butter to accompany the bread.

Soon, we were back to eating airplane food. The standard meals on SIA always come with two choices, and the other choice always seems better after you get your meal.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Photo album on [flickr].

Twitter and I

2011-04-30T14:18:00.008+08:00

I noticed that less than 1% of my friends have a Twitter account. In April 2010, it was estimated that there were already about 930,000 Twitter users in Singapore, which is like 20% of the population. So, what the hell guys?

If you've not heard of Twitter, it is an online service which you can post short messages (tweets) and anyone can read them. On the flip side, you can read the tweets that anyone posts, and this is the most useful feature of Twitter.

I know you are probably thinking that you don't want a barrage of tweets banging down your broadband internet. This is why Twitter has the concept of "following". When you login to your Twitter account, what you see are only the tweets of users whom you are following. Conversely, your tweets will appear to users who are following you.

Indeed, anyone can still read your tweets when they access your Twitter page. Are you that concerned about privacy? Then don't post any tweets! But if you choose to eschew Twitter as a whole, then you are missing out on a whole Twitterverse of culture, current events, education, jokes, knowledge, lifehacks, technology, and updates. The best part is, by choosing whom to follow you can choose what kind of information you receive. The bestest bestest part is, sources of such information are more than the mainstream and official sources; you can get different perspectives by following different people involved in the same things. And even though each tweet can only be 140 characters long (circumventable by certain add-ons), most of them include links with their tweets to the full-length versions of the information.

I use Twitter mostly for keeping up to date with the latest goings-on around the world, though sometimes I use it to vent my frustrations, happiness, thoughts, and musings. This could explain the reduced frequency of postings on this blog, but I think the major excuse is that I've been really busy.

Included in the list of Tweeters I follow are: Wikileaks, SaveBradley, sgelection, Mr Brown, CNN, engadget, Peter Serafinowicz, Stephen Fry, Piers Morgan, Dalai Lama, Danny Simpson... I am currently following 137 users but I'm adding more at an exponential rate.

If you noticed, the Twitter accounts I mentioned are quite varied in terms of what the user is known for. These are pretty active tweeters in that they often post updates.

Wikileaks keeps me up-to-date with the latest leaks they post onto the website. I'm not going to be drawn into the controversy of the site, but since the info is there, it will only serve me well to be in on it.

As for SaveBradley, well I used to firmly believe that he should be released and be heralded as a hero. I still think that, but I refrain from yelling it out on rooftops because, well, what do I know?

sgelection keeps me up-to-date with the latest political party news and PAP gaff (mostly PAP gaffs), though it seems that posts from sgelection does lean slightly for the opposition and against the incumbent. Again I mostly sit on the fence on this one since I can't vote anyway, but I do applaude some of the issues that the opposition parties have bravely raised, and I do deride some of the "low blows" that the incumbent make against the opposition. If I were to give an opinion, it is simply, everyone should really think deep what are the really troubling issues that need to be dealt with, what do we really want by living in Singapore (happiness?), and don't forget those less fortunate than you deserve equal happiness.

Twitter accounts like CNN give me the latest world news.

Engadget and other tech news publishers give me the low-down about the newest science and technology.

Guys like Peter Serafinowicz bring laughter to many a lonely night. I especially like the occasional #PSQA sessions when he takes tough questions through Twitter and answers them through Twitter.

Guys like Stephen Fry always have a wide variety of interesting and cool ideas and information to share.

It always warms my cockles when I read the most recent way in which people like Piers Morgan strip the manhood of people like Alan Sugar, Rio Ferdinand, and Michael Owen (but they take it like men).

His Holiness the Dalai Lama never fails to express his spiritual yet surprisingly-relevant-in-the-real-world wisdom.

And my man, my bro Danny Simpson who plays for Newcastle United. His tweets after a football match is the closest I will ever come to taking part in a Premier League game. And you can just feel the disappointment in his tweets when they lose, or the sheer joy when they win. I just hope his Twitter account is really run by him.

In conclusion, I hope you've seen how Twitter has enriched my life and broadened my mind, and I hope you can see how it can do the same for you. I mean really, you're big boys now, you shouldn't need me to tell you this!

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Interesting Points of Interest - My Twitter account is pushypanda, follow me if you want!

Speed 3: The Heat Is On

2011-03-27T14:19:00.004+08:00

POP QUIZ HOTSHOT! There's an engine in this car. Once the car is near to a stop, the engine starts heating up. If it remains stationary long enough, it blows up. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO???

"Let you drive?" I told my Pop.

But we both knew, that was not possible. He and my Mom were about to leave on a cruise when the car engine cooling fans died. Yeah Dad, go on a cruise and let the kid handle things when things start to get hairy. To be fair they had already planned this for weeks. They originally wanted to go to Japan but well, you know how things turned out...

The Japan thing happened literally within the hour that my Dad was making the online booking for airline tickets. My Mom who was watching the news literally grabbed his hand right before he could click on the "pay" button. Then they heard of a ship coming the next day from America I think which was bringing in some musicians who were gonna perform at Sentosa I think. So they decided to go for that instead of Japan. Literally within the hour that they were about to leave the house for that performance, they heard that the performance was cancelled because the ship changed course to Japan instead to help out over there.

Anyway, back to the car. So yeah, nothing we could do about it today since it's Sunday. So I had to drive the car home from Harbourfront, avoiding traffic and stops where possible, and tomorrow bring the car to the workshop.

The drive home was exciting. Not being very familiar where the workshop is and knowing that it is hard to find the entrance to it, I thought it would be a good idea to go explore the area since it's a Sunday and there should be very little traffic. Well, Ubi is where the driving school is, and Sunday is when all the non-Catholics have their driving lessons. At every stop I made, and there were a lot, I could see the engine temperature meter needle moving up the dial, and it was moving baby! Once it reaches the red part of the dial, you have mere seconds before...

You have to keep moving so the airflow can bring the heat away from the engine. And wherever there was space, I moved baby! There are a few stages to go through before reaching critical temperature. First, the needle starts moving up. Then at a certain temperature, the air-conditioning dies. After a certain point, hot air starts to come out of the air-conditioner. God only knows what happens after that stage...

I got done for speeding once, but this time it's for my life!

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Interesting Points of Interest - This blog has no affiliation whatsoever with this guy who makes such a big deal out of every little thing in his life.

The Farm Matrix

2011-03-23T22:21:00.008+08:00

I'm sure everyone knows that running a farm is not as simple as some Facebook app. I should know, I'm something of a farmist. Today we're most honoured to have world renowned farmist Dr Vladimir to share with us some tips on how to farmerize well.

Hello I am Vladimir, farmer of Mother Russia. I am here to tell you about how to be farmer. Farmer is very special job for me. I learned farming when I was in Gulag, except in Gulag we chop trees and mine coal, but concept is mostly same.

There are some things that farmers need to keep track of farm - food consumption, water consumption, and space usage. Back home, I keep 4 types of animals - ducks, chickens, pigs, and cows. So, food consumption, water consumption, and space usage depends on number of animals I have in farm. Here are equations for to use in the calculations:

To make things easier, I write equations into this format:

Let us name each block with a letter:

From this format, calculating the food, water, and space consumption is just game of match the row to the column. For example, to calculate food, multiply each number in first row of F to corresponding animal in A. That is to say, first number in first row of F multiply to first animal in A, then second number in F multiply to second animal in A, and so on. Then add up each of the answers to get food consumption.

For each of next two rows of C (water and space), do the same but using the next two rows of F. That is to say, to calculate water, multiply each number in second row of F to corresponding row of A. And to calculate space, multiply each number in third row of F to corresponding row of A.

So, if you count number of ducks, chickens, pigs, and cows in farm, you can place numbers into A and do multiplication and addition to get food, water, and space consumption. Is all for today. I will come back tomorrow to tell you more about farm. Free beef stroganoff in back, do eat up.

Thank you Vladimir for that highly informative talk. Quick english lesson - it's "farmist" not "farmer".

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Interesting Points of Interest - This blog has no affiliation whatsoever with that guy who keeps saying "farmist".

The Return of the King

2011-03-21T13:01:00.019+08:00

Hey guys, I'm back. I haven't posted anything in quite a while, apart from yesterday's botched interview which descended into chaos. Anyway I'm back, and I think I have something good to offer you this time, just stay with me.

I'm gonna tell you how to create your own computer program for Windows XP onwards. To follow these steps, you don't need any computer programming knowledge. However, to start programming your own computer programs, you will need some programming knowledge. Don't worry, I'll help you along there when we come to it.

Core of a Program

What are the ingredients that make a computer program? Anyone who has used a PC before can tell you, every program has:

a) a window
b) beautiful graphics
c) keyboard/mouse control system

Once you can get these three things running, you're on your way to great programs.

Step 1: The Development Environment

The development environment refers to the environment in which you are going to develop your program. A good development environment typically consists of the following:

- huge collection of music
- paper and pen to plan the program and doodle and make paper airplanes
- cauldron of coffee (CoC)
- computer with Windows XP or above installed
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express

Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express is a piece of software called an integrated development environment. It does not include music, paper, or CoC, but it does make it easier to develop programs. It's also free, so go ahead and download it at this link: [click]

If you are a student, you might be able to get Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional or even Ultimate for free through the Dreamspark program or the MSDN Academic Alliance. The usage is basically the same but those editions include more libraries and more advanced features I guess.

After you've installed Visual C++, you can start with your first program. Open up Visual C++ and create a new empty project. Remember to give the project a name. Doing that will lead you to the project view. Right click on the "Source Files" folder in the Solution Explorer on the left and add a new .cpp file and call it main. Oh and if you're a beginner you should change the configuration to Release Mode (just trust me on this). Next, write your code in main.cpp . You can use this code if you have no ideas at the moment (here's a tip for learning programming - manually type the code you are copying rather than copy and paste it):


#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

void main()
{
    cout<<"Hello world!"<<endl;
}

Once you're done with the code, click the "Build Solution" button or press F7 to build the program. The executable file of the program will be created in the output folder. Start a command prompt to run the program and feast on the fruits of your labour. Most importantly, you can use this as the base for future projects.

Here are screenshots of the steps to help you along (click for larger):

For newbies: A little explanation of the code.


#include <iostream>

This line indicates we want to refer to a header file called "iostream". You've not seen this header file before, no worries. It belongs to a standard library which Visual C++ automatically knows where to find (it's installed with Visual C++).


using namespace std;

Ignore this for now. Well the short answer is it allows you to type "cout" and other function names without having to type "std::" in front every time.


void main()

Main is a function. It is the entry point of your program, meaning when the program is started, the entry point function - main - is automatically called, meaning the first code executed is the code in main.

Step 2: Keyboard Interaction

Libraries are code already written for specific purposes which you can use to achieve those functions in your program (like math, networking, etc). Libraries are a very important component in software development. Without them, you would be writing the code to achieve every little function in your program yourself. Sure it's possible to write some code to parse an html page yourself, but after you've done that you would be left as only a shadow of your past self.

Recall the core of every program - window, graphics, keyboard/mouse. Lets start with the easiest first - keyboard/mouse, but without the mouse.

You will need the Windows SDK for this, which comes with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate but not Express. SDK stands for Software Development Kit. With the Windows SDK you're well on your way to developing great Windows applications. Download it from [here] and install it.

Now it's time to add some code to get keyboard interaction. Include the "windows.h" header file. Add a boolean global variable called "QUIT" and a function called "KeyboardListener". This function will listen for specific key presses as long as your program is running. We will run this function in a separate thread as the main function so as not to interrupt the running of the main function. A multi-threaded program allows the program to multi-task, each thread for each task. This results in a much more responsive program which doesn't need to run linearly. You need to include "process.h" for the multi-threading. This header file is included with the Visual C++ installation. Modify the main function to create the thread and to ask the thread to call the KeyboardListener function. Refer to the image below for details:

For newbies: A little explanation of the code.


bool QUIT = false;

In this line, we are creating a variable called "QUIT" of the type "bool" which means boolean and assigning it a value of "false". A variable is something that stores a value. The kind of value it can store is its type. A boolean variable can only have one of two possible values - true or false. These are actually just the numbers 1 and 0 (I forget which number is for which but it can be easily found or tested) so you can use numbers or the words "true" and "false" interchangeably. If we create the variable outside of any functions, then that variable is global, which means it can be accessed by all the functions. As you can see, both main and KeyboardListener use the QUIT variable. Also, you can name a variable any name you want as long as it does not begin with a number.


short KeyState;

"short" is another variable type. The possible values for a short variable are integers in the range between -32,768 to 32,767 (the number of values that can be represented by 2 bytes). Notice that this variable called "KeyState" is defined inside the KeyboardListener function, so it is a local variable to KeyboardListener which main can't access. Also it has not been assigned any value when it is created. It is assigned a value in the line below, with the value returned by GetAsyncKeyState(). That's right, functions can return values. More on that later.


_beginthread(KeyboardListener, 0, NULL);

This is a function that is from the library to which "process.h" also belongs. If you don't include "process.h", you will get a red line below this line in Visual C++ and also if you try to build the program you will get compilation errors.


do
{
    Sleep(100);
}
while(!QUIT);

This code segment shows a do-while loop. A loop is a code segment that repeats for a number of cycles as defined in the code. In this do-while loop, the code segment inside the brackets repeats for as long as the QUIT variable does not have a value of "true". "while(!QUIT)" is the conditional statement of the loop. "!" means "not". If you just say "while(QUIT)", you are saying "repeat this code while QUIT is true", so if you add the "!" there, you are changing it to "while QUIT is not true".

"Sleep()" is a function from "process.h". "Sleep(100)" makes the thread from which it is called to pause for 100 milliseconds, during which time other threads are given a chance to run. Normally, programs don't run as expected if you have empty do-while loops, so normally you need something in them. I have not bothered to figure out why yet. You can try the program without the Sleep line and see what happens.

Step 3: A Window

When you say you want to make a window for your program, what you mean is that you want to create a graphical user interface (GUI). In this tutorial, I will show you how to do this using Qt, a GUI library. Go ahead and download it from [here]. Choose LGPL and then on the right side "Qt libraries 4.7.2 for Windows (VS 2008, 218 MB)". If by the time you read this there are newer versions, then download the similar option out of the newer versions. I'm gonna assume you're installing it in the default directory of C:\Qt\4.7.2\ .

Continuing from the project that was created in step 1 and 2, here is what you need to do:

a - b) Add a new header file (.h) and call it "main" (so it becomes main.h).

c) In the main.h file, include the QtCore and QtGui header files and declare the Window class which inherits code from the QWidget class (this exists in the Qt library files).

d) In the main.cpp file, include the newly created "main.h", and define the Window class (declaring a function exists is not defining how the function works, define means to write the actual code of the functions that were declared in the Window class i.e. implement the functions). Also, add code in the main function to display the window.

e - g) In the project properties, add the "C:\Qt\4.7.2\include" directory as an additional include directory.

h - i) Still in the project properties, add the "C:\Qt\4.7.2\lib" directory as an additional library directory.

j - k) Still in the project properties, add the "QtCore4.lib" and "QtGui4.lib" library files as additional dependencies.

l) Right click on the main.h file in the solution explorer and go to Properties.

m) In main.h's properties, under General which is under Configuration Properties, change the Item Type to "Custom Build Tool".

n - o) Still in main.h's properties, add the line "C:\Qt\4.7.2\bin\moc.exe "%(FullPath)" -o "%(RootDir)%(Directory)moc_%(Filename).cpp" to the Command Line field under the Custom Build Tool options.

p) Still in main.h's properties, in the Outputs field, add the line "%(RootDir)%(Directory)moc_%(Filename).cpp"

q - r) Build the solution. You will get some "unresolved external symbol" errors which are linker errors. This means it can't find some code for functions you have declared.

s - t) During steps q - r, although the build attempt resulted in an error, a new file called moc_main.cpp was created in the same directory as main.cpp. Add moc_main.cpp as a source file in the solution explorer.

u - v) Build the solution again, there should be no errors now and a new executable will be generated.

w) Execute the executable in the command prompt and a nice window for the program should appear.

Step 4: Graphics

Ok now we want to draw something in the lovely window. In graphics there are 2D graphics and 3D graphics. I'll stick to 2D graphics for now to keep things simple, though 3D graphics is not that much harder (use the OpenGL library which is included in Windows SDK and Qt convenience functions for OpenGL by including QtOpenGL).

We're gonna make the program display an image. All we gotta do to make this happen is modify the code. No need to do all the project properties and add files and all that. Programming doesn't sound so bad anymore does it?

Everything is in the screenshots:

If you're really a newbie, then perhaps we're level jumping a little by introducing the concept of classes. But it's good to get right in. So, a class is a collection of variables, functions, and objects. The variables, functions, and objects are called members of the class.

You may have noticed that certain members are declared as public and others as private. Public means the member can be accessed by any function in the program. Private means only other members can access it. Objects are actually classes which have been created.

Ok, so you declare a class in a header file, then you implement the member functions in the source file. Then, you create an instance of the class like you create a variable, i.e. "Classname variableName;" So a created instance of a class is called an object, and the usage is similar to that of variables except that you can access public members. Access is done like "objectName.member". However, if you are using a pointer to an object, then access is done like "pointerName->member". Which brings us to the question of what's a pointer.

A pointer is a variable that stores the memory address of an object or variable. Declaration of a pointer is just the name of the object or variable but with an asterisk added, i.e. "Typename* pointerName;" Pointers are very useful, as you will find out as you do more programming projects. We can already see a use for it in this tutorial by providing global access to an object that is local to the main function, by declaring the pointer as a global variable.

End of This Tutorial

Of course, we didn't actually create a full game here. To do that, you need to add some game logic, more graphics, and maybe some animations, which means you really need to go bone up on programming knowledge. Having said that, if you followed this tutorial from beginning to end, then you would have been introduced to a mixture of basic and advanced programming concepts. I hope this puts you in a position to better understand these and other programming concepts when you really do go bone them up (?).

Also, not everyone's development environment, in particular the PC and operating system and versions of stuff etc, are the same so you may encounter some difficulties which I didn't encounter. If you get problems building the executable, then look at the output window of Visual C++ for the error message. If it's a linker error, then you need to figure out what library you're missing or maybe you're missing the library directory. If you get something like "function is undefined" error, then you may be forgetting to include the correct header file as well as adding the header's include directory to the project properties. If it's some other error and you're a newbie, more than likely you mistyped something or left out a ";" or something. If you don't know what the error means, cut and paste the error message into Google. You can also ask me though I may not have time to answer.

Also, the way I've shown to get a window, graphics, and keyboard interaction is not the only way, and in particular the keyboard interaction part is not the best way by far. Actually, if you're using Qt for GUI, you can add buttons and sliders and all sorts of controls and it also handles mouse and keyboard (I believe). Normally GUI libraries will handle all that. I've tried to keep things as simple as possible in this tutorial while theoretically being able to create a good program. But keep learning and searching and reading, you'll discover many different ways of doing things.

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Interesting Points of Interest - If this tutorial leads you to become a highly successful software developer, do remember whence the river flows.

FAQ

2011-03-20T18:11:00.006+08:00

To all those saying that I lack the passion, creativity, and intelligence to keep this blog going: FAQ!

Where have you been?

I have been busy to the n-th degree. First I had a take-home exam about 3D vision which I spent a solid two weeks on without doing anything else. I have another one to be due soon. I have also had weekly assignments about computational geometry that each take a solid week to learn and do, though they have been becoming easier in recent weeks, but that's because the project is going to be due soon. Apart from that, I've had the usual research stuff and also extra lab stuff that need to be done such as setting up a network printer for a printer that has no network port and also creating a live interactive poster, plus a whole bunch of other stuff that keep cropping up when I think I can sit down and relax! I have had absolutely no time at all to post interesting points of interest!

Then why are you able to post such an interesting post now?

That's because I managed to increase productivity by 17%, and I also cut expenditure
without losing a single member of staff. I also stopped jogging but hey, we all have to make sacrifices during hard times.

Hey that sounds a lot like a line from The Office (UK). Is it?

Yes, except for the jogging one. I watched The Office (UK) and Extras recently. For me, The Office started off slow and boring but picked up midway through the first season. Extras hit the ground flying, every minute of it is great. These two shows are for the most part comedies but they both have melancholic undertones. The main characters of each show, both played by Ricky Gervais, are quite deep and you see them evolve as each series progresses. Although each series is only two seasons long, they both have a Christmas special to bring the curtain down, and I feel the Christmas specials are an integral part of the shows. Both Christmas specials are very emotional but the endings are happy. Let me remind you that these are supposed to be comedies.

Yes I know, I saw the shows, that's why I recognized that line about the 17% productivity whatever. What is a take-home exam anyway?

It is an exam which you can do at home. We were given about a month to do the last one and there were 8 questions. Those were some sleepless nights.

It sounds easy. Is it easy?

It most certainly is not!

You sound free now. Have you been working on any great videos or animations recently?

Actually, I just completed one a couple of weeks ago. I had some videos taken during our Christmas party lying around and I decided to make them into something. Would you like to see it?

Couple of weeks ago? I thought you were too busy to do anything... Yes yes let us see it.

Do you like it?

Wow she's got mad skills! I like the video very much!

So what have you been up to?

Oh you know, just the usual. Going around interviewing bloggers who have not been updating their blog.

Are there many of them?

Yes, but yours is the only interesting blog that has not been updated for a while.

You're too kind. Do you do anything that is constructive?

What do you mean 'constructive'? This is my job, I do this for a living.

Can hardly call this a job now can you? I mean, right now I'm the one asking all the questions.

Well yes, that's because it's after 6pm, my office hours are over. This is my free time.

Oh and I suppose I'm providing a free interview service by asking you questions?

How am I supposed to know? You just started asking questions without me asking you to!

"How am I supposed to know?" That sounds like a question to me. So what now, you're working overtime?

No! I can ask questions in my free time can't I?

Yes you can, next question please.

Ah ha! Don't try and fool me into asking more questions. I won't fall for it.

Are you there?

Yes I'm here. Next question please.

*groan*

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Interesting Points of Interest - Is your work done? Are all pigs fed, watered, and ready to fly? - David Brent.

Voronoi Diagrams and Application(s)

2011-02-04T11:00:00.011+08:00

'Tis a sad sad time for me, Don Juan. I　had built my City of Love and all was going swimmingly. But then, I flew too close to the sun on wings of my libido. That is to say, I got greedy. I took on too many lovers and had to build too many houses in my City of Love. My "graph" of houses could not be "planar". There were many criss-crosses and intervening houses. Now they all think I'm a eighty-timing bastard when actually all Don Juan has is a big heart full of love, or as we say in my native Spain, mi corazón lleno de amor.

Anyways, now they're all after my blood. The bad news is I can't leave my City of Love because I work there. The good news is that my ladies never leave their houses due to a little "infestation" that I introduced to the city. Yes, yes, [that] was me. So what I want now is a way to navigate the City of Love such that I'm always as far away as possible from the houses of my ladies. Hey, apart from the office I still need to go buy groceries and other stuff. Fortunately, my Russian brother Georgy Voronoi and I sat down at the coffee shop the other day and worked out a neat solution. But the bastard named it after himself and left me for dead.

Here's a section of the City of Love with the houses demarcated using a Voronoi diagram:

As long as I stay on the black lines, I will be as far away from the surrounding houses as I possibly can, and hopefully out of firing range of the ladies.

Every black line is a bisecting line between two adjacent houses:

The Voronoi diagram is built up from the bisecting lines of adjacent point pairs:

And thus, the city of Paris was divided into the 80 districts of today.

The End

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Interesting Points of Interest - The owner of this blog has no affiliation whatsoever with Brother Juan.

Welcome Year of the Rabbit

2011-02-02T22:11:00.018+08:00

If you can recall, a tiger struggled from out of the river onto the river bank, exhausted, because he stayed up late the night before watching football. But he did put in a lot of effort to get to third. Next a rabbit came up. He hadn't actually swam because he hopped from log to log instead....

And so we come to the rabbit year.

Chinese New Year was more fun for me in the past. Back then, maybe before the turn of the century, the affair was grander. Since my mother's side of the family and my father's side were in two different cities in Malaysia, we would usually have two reunion dinners. And the two sides would be so kind as to arrange the reunion dinner so that my family would have time to make both.

So normally, the first reunion dinner would be with my mom's side in Johor Bahru, and almost all my immediate uncles and aunts and their families would gather at my aunt's house. As each family arrives, the unmarried people would respectfully offer a pair of oranges to the elders while wishing them "gong hei fatt choy". In return, the elders will give a red packet. My aunt's house in JB is huge. And for every Chinese New Year without fail back then, she'd make her famous Pepper Soup. I tell you, it will cure whatever cold or flu you have and leave your throat sore as a red thumb.

Back then it was fun for me because all the many people of my generation at an age suitable for all of us to have fun together. I remember playing a lot of computer games with my cousin but that was a normal activity even when not during a special occasion. When all the cousins got together, all I remember is a lot of noise and laughter and just talking rubbish.

The old folks were not left out of the fun. They were just as noisy if not more so (and they still are now). The best part of the festivities for me was always the card games. We had a game called "cow add water" where everyone is dealt 5 cards, and we have to have 3 cards that add up to a multiple of 10, then the last 2 cards will be your score. For example, a valid hand would be 5 3 2, 4 6. In this case the score would be 10, which is the highest score, but not the best hand. If the last 2 cards have the same value, that means you get double what you bet. To make it more interesting, 3 and 6 are interchangeable. Everyone is always playing against a single dealer, normally the head of the house but sometimes the guy with the biggest pot of coins (my uncle). Since a deck has 52 cards, the maximum number of players was 10, but everyone got to join in because we'd have non-players augmenting players' bets with their own money and investing capital in some players. Some people would even add bets to multiple players if they feel "the market is good" i.e. the dealer is on a losing streak.

Some years, we would have some firecrackers as well. I remember once, my cousin brought the type of fireworks that's made up of red cylinders hanging on a string. So we hung it up outside the house. Everyone gathered inside the house with the sliding glass door closed, looking at my cousin light the end of the string. After he lit it, he quickly opened the door, ran into the house, closed it, and everyone covered their ears. I remember it was loud, but in the end not that loud.

After the reunion dinner's day's activities, and maybe one more day of activities in JB (many people would sleep over at my aunt's, well not so much sleep over as mahjong over), my family would say our last "gong hei fatt choy"s and drive up to Kuala Lumpur for the next reunion dinner. I always felt terribly sad to be leaving all my cousins in JB.

The reunion dinner in KL always took place at Grandma's house. And Grandma always cooked. Grandma was a proper chef I tell you. I mean she not just cooked, she created. Her food was art. It was not visual art but rather flavour art. Anyway, reunion dinner in KL was similar to that in JB in that all the cousins would have a great time together and we also indulge in card games, but we usually played blackjack instead. The act of offering oranges to elders and receiving red packets was also not as formal as in JB. Normally the elders would just come and quietly pass you the red packets.

We always had firecrackers during Chinese New Year in KL. There was a little provision shop that my cousins used to go to get the firecrackers. They always got the rocket type which flew up and exploded in the air, and also one that spins round on the ground and creates a spiral spark show. Maybe those are the only two types that the shop sold. We had firecrackers every year that I can remember, but it always seemed like a last minute decision. One cousin will ask "eh, so, you wanna get firecrackers?" and another will reply "hmmm kyah, get from uncle jack's shop? ok ok" and he'd run off to get it. Half an hour later he'd be back with the two types of firecrackers.

After one or two days in KL, I actually would be glad to be going home. That's because Grandma's house always always made me get sick. That means, by the time we would be going home, I'd be having a cough and a fever. Then I'd be back in Singapore resting for the next few days to recover from the Grandma's House Flu. This is when I wish I had some of my aunt's famous Pepper Soup.

Now, Chinese New Year is not so grand anymore. We don't go up to KL so often anymore. We'd still have a kind of reunion dinner (or reunion lunch) at a restaurant or at my aunt's house in Singapore. Only my aunt's family and my family, an odd uncle or two without their families, and a special guest family which changes every year whom I've never met before as it's always a distant relative. We don't bother with the offering of oranges anymore. The most we'd do is wish "gong hei fatt choy" or even "happy new year" to get the red packets. And most recently, we no longer play "cow add water". Instead, we play Texas Hold 'Em Poker. No doubt the popularity of Texas Hold 'Em must have started from Casino Royale and multiplied by the Facebook Texas Hold 'Em game. Sometimes, I must agree with the elders' thinking that technology kills good clean fun.

Here is what we did for this year's celebration...

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The above is a screenshot from one of the greatest movies of all time - Teppanyaki. Recently, I went for a "reunion lunch" with my lab mates at a teppanyaki restaurant and it totally reminded me of this show. Funniest show ever. Teppanyaki. Starring Michael Hui and Sally Yeh. Old school I know.

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A new Winnie the Pooh movie is coming out. Here's the trailer. The beginning makes it feel like a thriller. Then the music comes on and it sounds more like a romantic dramedy.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Wishing happiness for people is more effective for them than wishing prosperity.

Test Post

2011-01-30T15:10:00.001+08:00

If you can read this, it means my Blogger Buddy gadget on Windows 7 works.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Always finding ways to make life more efficient

Graph Theory and Application(s)

2011-01-25T10:22:00.017+08:00

Hi, I'm Don Juan, and I just learned a bit of graph theory.

I have many lovers, and I want to build a City of Love for my ladies. But I need to build it in such a way that I can move from one lady's house to another without crossing paths with another lady or going through the house of another lady.

This is why I learned Graph Theory.

Basics

In graph theory, each house is called a vertex (V), and each path is called an edge (E). Regions enclosed by edges are called faces (F). Take note that even the seemingly un-bound region is technically a face, and therefore it must always be counted as a face. Sometimes, vertices, edges, and faces are also called nodes (N), arcs (A), and regions (R) respectively.

A graph is defined by a set of V and E, i.e. G(V,E). On paper or computer, you can draw a graph any way you wish as long as you have the same set of V and all the E connecting the same V.

Since a graph is just points with links, it can even be drawn in 3D or higher. A drawing of a graph is called an embedding of a graph. I, Don Juan, am only interested in a 2D embedding, since there are no flying houses or flying horses.

Furthermore, I want a planar embedding, which means the edges do not cross each other at points where there are no vertices. Furthermore, I want the graph to be complete, which means every vertex is connected to every other vertex.

It should be noted that the type of graph I am talking about is a simple graph, which has no loops (edges leading back to the same vertex), undirected (edges have no direction), and there are no multiple edges linking the same pair of vertices.

It should also be noted that edges need not be straight.

Planarity

As I have said, a planar embedding of a graph is when the edges do not cross at points where there are no vertices. A graph which has a planar embedding is called a planar graph. I want this property so that I don't risk crossing paths with a lady friend when I'm on the way to visit another lady friend.

Euler's Relation

A graph which is possible to planar embed will have the following relation, according to my dear Swiss Brother Euler:

Components are sets of vertices of a graph which are linked. A graph with two sets of vertices which do not have an edge between them thus has 2 components.

It should be noted that, since graphs can have many ways of embedding (drawing), that you can know the number of V, E, and C by just counting, but you can't know the number of F by just counting and say, oh, since the relation is true that means this graph has a planar embedding. That is to say, Euler's relation holds for the planar embedding of a graph, if it has one.

The thing is, while the relation is true for all planar embeddings, it may also be true for some non-planar embeddings. Therefore, this relation can only be used to see if a certain graph has no planar embedding by proving that that relation cannot be true for that graph.

Homeomorphism to K5 and K3,3

Polish Brother Kuratowski came up with a theorem that states that a graph is planar if and only if the graph does not have a sub-graph that is homeomorphic to K5 or K3,3.

Couple of things to clear up here - homeomorphism and K5 and K3,3.

Simply put, K5 and K3,3 are the non-planar graphs shown below:

K3,3 belongs to a family of graphs called bipartite graphs. This means that there are two sets of vertices and vertices from one set can only connect to vertices of the other set, vertices of the same set cannot connect to each other.

Homeomorphism in graph theory is a concept whereby two graphs are said to be homeomorphic to each other if one graph can be transformed into the other by a sequence of operations known as subdivision or smoothing.

Subdivision is when a vertex is added along an edge and the two vertices which were initially joined by the edge are now joined to the new vertex instead. Smoothing is when a degree-2 vertex, which is a vertex which has exactly 2 edges joined to it, is removed, and the two vertices that were initially joined to the removed vertex are now joined to each other

Maximally Connected Graphs

A maximally connected graph is a planar graph where the addition of one more edge breaks the planarity of the graph by crossing one or more of the existing edges.

A maximally connected graph with 3 or more vertices has the following properties:

For the third property, because the average degree of a vertex is 6 - 12/v, it has to be less than 6. For a set of elements of a certain average value, there has to be at least one of the elements having the average value or less.

Any graph which does not have all of these properties is not a maximally connected graph. If you analyse slightly further, you can get similar properties for simple connected planar graphs (not maximal), just that the number of edges or faces could be less than the maximal case when you add a vertex:

The relationship between edges and faces can be used to help prove (together with Euler's Relation) that K5 is non-planar.

For planar bipartite graphs, we can add a further and stricter restriction to the relationship between edges and faces (this can be used to help prove that K3,3 is non-planar):

How to Design the City of Love

It would seem that the largest complete (all vertices have edges to all other vertices) planar graph is this one:

If I want more ladies, I would either have to accept the risk of running into one of them when I'm on my way to another lady, or I might need to accept that I have to make a stop at one or more lady's house on the way to another. That might not seem like such a bad idea actually...

And thus, the city of Paris was built.

The End

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Interesting Points of Interest - The owner of this blog has no affiliation whatsoever with Brother Juan.

2011-01-18T11:38:00.004+08:00

Computers, geometry, and how they see. These are issues that will be plaguing my mind for the next five months, because of the two modules that I'm studying this semester. They sound like really exciting modules, because of numerous warnings posted by the respective lecturers.

"This is a research oriented (and a tough) module."

Don't even talk about computers yet. Do you even know how people see and recognize objects? Here is one theory...

Geons

This theory is called Recognition by Components (RBC) and it's by Irving Biederman.

Every object can be broken down into a set of primitive components, i.e. different combinations of these components represent different objects. These components are called geons. Each geon is described by a standard set of four properties called non-accidental properties:

Edge: whether the edges are curved or straight
Symmetry: whether the object has reflectional, rotational, or no symmetry
Size: whether the object is constant in size, expanding, or expanding and contracting
Axis: whether the axis of the object is straight of curved

If you codify these properties into a numerical code, every geon can be represented by a 4-digit number, with each digit representing each non-accidental property. If you use the non-accidental properties that I listed above, you can get 36 distinct geons (2 x 3 x 3 x 2).

The hypothesis is that humans break down every object they see into the individual geons to recognize them.

By breaking down the complex issue of object recognition into few simple components, we can see how this might be implemented in a computer so that a computer can recognize objects.

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Interesting Points of Interest - "If I could know me, I could know the univerze v(o.o)v" - Shirley Maclaine.

Kinecting

2011-01-17T15:07:00.010+08:00

This post is about how to connect a Kinect to your PC and how to get the Windows drivers and sample programs working. There is also a small section on how, if you're an NUS student or staff, you can connect to the hidden NUS WiFi signal on Android. This hidden WiFi signal is secure and doesn't require you to log in on the web browser every time you log on.

Kinect

The Kinect was a highly-anticipated add-on device for the XBox 360 gaming console system. It is a device that contains depth and colour cameras that allows it to create images with depth information.

Although meant to be used solely for gaming on an XBox 360, the hardware capabilities of the device makes it useful for many applications such as controlling computer applications using hand gestures or even full body motion. At first, no drivers for PC platforms were released, which meant the device had to be hacked. Soon, a hacker-created drivers for the PC were released.

Recently, an organization called OpenNI, NI for Natural Interaction, was created, whose purpose is to "certify and promote the compatibility and interoperability of Natural Interaction (NI) devices, applications and middleware". Through OpenNI, PrimeSense, the makers of the depth camera hardware in the Kinect, released what are widely known as "official open source drivers for the Kinect", "OpenNI framework for application development using natural interaction devices", and "NITE motion tracking middleware". These can be downloaded from the downloads section of the OpenNI website.

If you want minimum frustration, don't download those yet. Wait for my step-by-step instructions.

As I've found out first-hand, the framework and NITE middleware seem to be the real deal, but the "official open source drivers for the Kinect" are not quite for the Kinect. The driver package you download from the official OpenNI site is a small 600kb file. Installing that package does not provide you the drivers for Kinect. You need to get the specially built Kinect driver which is almost 9mb big.

So here's what you do (for Windows):

1) Download the latest OpenNI Unstable Build for Windows from here: [link]

2) Download the latest PrimeSense NITE Unstable Build for Windows from [here] or [here]. Take note of the license key for when you install it (0KOIk2JeIBYClPWVnMoRKn5cdY4=)

3) Do not download the PrimeSensor Module from the OpenNI or PrimeSense website, rather get it from [here] or [here].

4) Install OpenNI Unstable Build for Windows (filename is OpenNI-Bin-Win32-v1.0.0.xx.exe).

5) Install SensorKinect driver (filename is SensorKinect-Win32-5.0.0.exe).

6) Install NITE Middleware (filename is NITE-bin-Win32-v1.3.0.xx.exe).

*Assuming you installed the stuff in their default locations*

7) Go to C:\Program Files\Prime Sense\Sensor\Driver and run the file dpinst-x86.exe (I'm not sure if this step is necessary, but it's what I did so). If your computer is amd64 architecture, then use the other file (dpinst-amd64.exe) I guess.

8) Plug in the Kinect and let the computer detect and associate the drivers for it (the Xbox NUI Audio driver is not available, so just let it be). The system might not find the drivers, in which case select the third option "I will specify what driver to use" or something like that, and choose Kinect Motor and Kinect Camera for the Xbox NUI Motor and Xbox NUI Camera respectively.

*go to C:\Program Files\Prime Sense\NITE\Data and open all three XML files in a text editor (Sample-Scene.xml, Sample-Tracking.xml, Sample-User.xml)*

9) In all three files, in the line " license vendor="PrimeSense" key="no key" ", change the "no key" to the license key, i.e. "0KOIk2JeIBYClPWVnMoRKn5cdY4="

10) In all three files, in the line " mapoutputmode xres="320" yres="240" fps="30" " change 320 to 640, and 240 to 480.

That's how to set up the Kinect for PC for creating your own applications in 10 steps. I haven't actually created my own applications yet so more work might be needed. But at least you will be able to run at least SOME of the sample programs in the NITE Middleware and OpenNI package.

Trying to draw a heart shape using my hand with the NITE sample program Point Viewer

NUS Secure WiFi on Android

In the Wi-Fi settings of your phone, when you're in NUS, you'll see an "NUSOPEN" network but not an "NUS" network. Do this:

1) Select "Add Wi-Fi network".
2) Enter the SSID "NUS".
3) Select "Security" to be "802.1x EAP".
4) Select "EAP method" to be "PEAP".
5) Select "Phase 2 authentication to be "MSCHAPV2".
6) Leave "CA certificate" and "User certificate" as "(unspecified)".
7) In "Identity" enter your student/staff ID.
8) In "Password" enter your password for your ID.
9) Save these settings and connect.

Enjoy your secure WiFi on campus without having to keep logging in at the "easy authentication" website.

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Interesting Points of Interest - This post is more for me to refer to in case I forget how to do these stuff, but you might find it useful too.

Keeping Up With The Hard Times

2011-01-04T21:25:00.007+08:00

When I tell you this post is about hard disks, you might feel that this is gonna be another long and boring post.

This post is about hard disks.

This is not another long and boring post. It's really important because we all use hard disks and there is some really important information I'm about to share before you buy the new generation of large capacity hard disks. And who knows, you might just learn a thing or two about hard disks. I'm not doing much to shake your doubts about this post am I?

The picture above doesn't just serve as the obligatory post title image. Look carefully and you will see some really really important instructions for how to "use" the hard disk. I bought this Western Digital Caviar 2 TB Green from (where else but) Sim Lim Square.

Admittedly, I never did any homework on this disk. I have bought many hard disks and installed them myself in my lifetime and they've all been pretty idiot-proof*. But this one, there are some really important instructions for this new generation, and it didn't come with any manual or booklet or anything which I would have appreciated. I ended up having to spend hours on the internet looking up stuff because those few short instructions are not enough to get things working the way you probably want them to. And there isn't even much help on the internet. I mostly found people asking for help and articles about how this new disk isn't very friendly for Windows XP users (which there are still a lot of).

We are going through a transition phase from the old generation of hard disks to the new generation, and as it turns out, it is a very big transition.

You see, back then, hard disks were using 512-byte sectors. But hard disk makers find that for larger capacity hard disks, it is more efficient and in fact only viable to use 4k-byte sectors.

Data on a hard disk is stored on a few stacked platters, each of which is read and written by a head. Data is physically arranged on concentric rings on each platter which are called tracks. On each track are multiple sectors and one sector is the smallest unit of storage on a hard disk. This means that, if the sector size is 512 bytes, even if your file is smaller than 512 bytes, the entire sector of 512 bytes will still be used up.

Now you're thinking "isn't it better to have the smallest sector size possible then?" The short answer is "no". The long answer is "no, because hard disks aren't actually extremely precise, so, much error-correction data must be stored for every sector. On lower capacity disks, the sectors did not need to be as tightly packed within the same physical space as the higher capacity disks nowadays. Unfortunately, the tighter you pack things, the worse the errors become so you need more error-correcting data to ensure your files do not get corrupted, which actually makes it harder to pack more useful memory capacity into the hard disk."

Imagine, if you keep increasing the capacity by packing sectors closer together, but as a result keep requiring more error-correcting data, you will come to a point where the amount you gain by packing the sectors is canceled by the amount you lose from the error-correcting data. So, a new scheme is necessitated!

Now, they are using 4k-byte, i.e. 4096-byte, sectors. These type of hard disks are now called Advanced Format hard disks. This requires less error-correction data because of the way the error-correction methods work. Furthermore, 4k is the size used for a lot of memory operations in current operating systems, which means that using a 4k-byte sector will improve of the performance of the hard disk for many operations. The downside is less efficient storage of files smaller than 4k, but nowadays this is not such a common occurrence.

So, now you're thinking "so what's the problem with using these new hard disks?" The problem is Windows XP and some other non-up-to-date disk management software are not made to deal with 4k-byte-sector hard disks. Of course, the manufacturers still cater for this market by having some "fixes". For the hard disk I bought, one method is to use a jumper (jumper not provided!) to connect pins 7 and 8 on the back of the hard disk. This "aligns" the partition blahblah to make it work on Windows XP, but it can only be used if you are only going to use the hard disk as one single partition. The other method is to use software from the Western Digital website to align the partitions on the hard disk after you've formatted and partitioned the hard disk. So, everything sounds good.

Now we come to the problem I was facing. I am a current computer user with a current hard disk. I want to buy a new, bigger hard disk and use it as my primary hard disk, and keep the old one(s) as backup. I don't want to reinstall Windows XP and every other thing, so what I can do is clone the partitions of my old hard disk onto the new blank hard disk. I chose to use Acronis Migration Easy to do this as I had heard good things, and the free trial is fully functional (not quite!) for 15 days. The best thing about this software is that you can not only clone the partitions, but also resize the partitions and make new partitions on the new hard disk.

My first few tries using Acronis Migration Easy, nothing got done to the new hard disk after the cloning operation "completed". I rebooted and tried to boot up the new hard disk but could not. I booted up the old hard disk and found the new one still empty.

Then I read about the aligning software and all that and went to get it, but when I tried to align I received an error that really doesn't help you understand what's wrong. It just said something like "Failed to move the selected data". This makes me think there's something wrong with my disk, but I used the Disk Diagnostic whatever tool from Western Digital and found nothing wrong.

Then I found a Western Digital Edition of Acronis True Image, a similar tool as Migration Easy. So I used that, chose the options to resize cloned partitions and all that, BUT received another meaningless error message which again gives the impression that the disk is faulty.

So I tried making bootable versions of Acronis True Image WD Edition as well as Acronis Easy Migration to a CD, booted up the CD, and tried them both. True Image WD Edition gave the same error, Acronis Easy Migration "fully functional" trial version said "Cannot complete the operation because this is a trial version" !!!

I scoured the internet for hours man. Finally FINALLY I found someone saying on a forum that the "resize the partitions" option doesn't work for him, but the "clone as is" option does! Now I was thinking, I don't want to keep the same size partitions because I got this hell of a big disk now! I tried the "clone as is" on True Image WD Edition anyway and it works.

So, now I have a C:\ partition that's 100 GB and a D:\ partition that's 200 GB, and the remaining 1.7 TB is unallocated. At this point, I have a couple of options. One is to use some partitioning software to resize the C:\ partition, but many people have reported that they can't boot afterwards, and I really don't have time to go through all this. The other option which I eventually took is to keep the 100 and 200 GB partitions, and create new partitions with the 1.7 TB and just work with this.

So now, I have:

[Priyadarshini] C:\ - 100 GB
[Earhart] D:\ - 200 GB
[Brownell] E:\ - 700 GB
[Rosa] F:\ - 1000GB

The partition capacities above are just rounded up. The 2 TB drive is actually reported as 1.8something TB in Windows XP. Also, you may have noticed that the volume labels are named after interesting women in history.

Oh, the built-in partitioning tool in Windows XP doesn't work. It just gives another meaningless error message, something like "error creating partition" or something. So I found a great free software to do the partitioning (not the cloning, but True Image WD Edition is free but apparently only works if you have a WD drive in your system). It's Easeus Partition Master Home Edition. It's free, and it can resize the system partition but I didn't dare to try it. No time to go through all that. I was at first skeptical that it would work on this new generation hard disk, but apparently it does. You have to run the Western Digital alignment utility after you partition the drive, but after that you can do whatever you want to it. I'm copying all my stuff over as we speak.

So, to summarize what I did and what free software to use to do what I did:

Clone your old hard disk to the new one (use the "as is" option) with True Image WD Edition
Set up the remaining partitions with Easeus Partition Master Home Edition.
Align the partitions on the new hard disk using WD Align (either Acronis or Paragon version should be ok, I used Acronis)

I hope now, you are more aware of this new development in computer technology and how to deal with making the transition, especially if you're still on Windows XP. For the guys that really need to resize their system partition, I have no definite answers for you but you could try Partition Master anyway.

If you're on Windows Vista or Windows 7, Linux, or Mac OS X, you should be able to use the hard disk right out of the box as those operating systems are already prepared.

For the sake of soon-to-be owners of the new hard disks who are using Windows XP, I hope they fix the "manual cloning" option soon.

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Interesting Points of Interest - *I broke one of the fixed power cables from the power supply attached to one of my old hard disks while installing the new hard disk. Idiot-proof, but not fool-proof huh?

2010 A Year in Review

2011-01-01T02:25:00.006+08:00

A review of a whole year should take years! Well, a year more like. Here at Interesting Points of Interest we like to take an overview, which makes the review a hell lot shorter. An overview of a review. Furthermore the overview is only of the things that we know, "we" referring to the staff at Interesting Points of Interest, of which there is only one therefore this should be a really really short review.

Some stuff that happened in 2010 that we may remember: Earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, South Korean ship gets sunk by some unknown force which many think is North Korea but they deny it, the BP oil spill, Thai political protests, ship carrying activists and bringing aid to the blockaded Gaza strip were boarded and attacked by the Isreali Navy, Spain won the World Cup, Cablegate and Afghan and Iraq war documents leaked by Wikileaks, Liu Xiaobo of China won the Nobel Peace Prize, Lien Chan of Taiwan apparently won the Confucius Peace Prize though he was not aware of it until after the fact, UK student protests against budget cuts for education and raising the tuition fee cap, arsenic-based life form discovered in a lake in California (which means it's very likely that aliens do exist), and many more!

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Friends turning into spamming robots. Do you experience this? I don't mean they literally become robots. I mean those friends with whom you haven't kept in contact with for a few years. All of a sudden, you receive spam emails from them. And if you imagine them literally getting assimilated into some hive spamming mind and it's literally them writing those emails but it's not them but just their physical bodily shells with nothingness inside and they're not even looking at the computer screen because they can't see because they have no more nervous system it's just the hive mind senses the computer and the keyboard and the email address and password and logs into their hotmail or gmail and types the spam email and hits send to your email as well as other email address that look like yours but have a number or underscore added. THAT is a scary thought isn't it. I mean, what if, one day, your body gets taken over by the spamming overlord?

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I absolutely adore this song, you have no idea! All the way from the 1920s, those seem like good times... There are many covers of the song, this is just one of the many:

This awesome song warrants lyrics to be posted:

You're the cream in my coffee,
You're the salt in my stew;
You will always be my necessity
I'd be lost without you.

You're the starch in my collar,
You're the lace in my shoe;
You will always be my necessity
I'd be lost without you.

Most men tell love tails,
And each phrase dovetails.
You've heard each known way,
This way is my own way.

You're the sail of my love boat,
You're the captain and crew;
You will always be my necessity
I'd be lost without you.

But then you also have to check out this wicked pianist playing this song:

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Interesting Points of Interest - Yesterday was New Year's Even and I had a report to submit by that night. Today is New Year's Day and I have a report to submit by tonight. Happy New Year indeed. My fault for not completing them earlier.

Bunch of Twits

2010-12-29T00:55:00.004+08:00

Well guys, I should tell you something: I don't do "small posts" on here anymore. Small stuff to share or say I share or say on Twitter. My account name is pushypanda, so, ya. For the more epic stuff I'll do it the proper way on here.

Well, don't be so resistant to these newfangled faddy social networking stuff just for the sake of being resistant to them. Twitter is not very time-consuming, just takes a minute or two to check the updates. Twitter is actually useful. You can keep up with the VERY latest news, you can look at the interesting stuff that other people share, you can SEARCH for the VERY latest news and tweets about anything, and you can very quickly and concisely express yourself cos as you know keeping shit to yourself is bad. Nevertheless, you never have to tweet a single thing. You can just be a lurker and leech off of other people's tweets.

Well, many famous people now Tweet, including the Prez of the USA, although it's well known that tweeting for the Prez is a full-time job of someone, and in fact many other famous people hire twits as well. British comedians seem to be in control of their own Twitter account though. I don't know, perhaps they get the more premium services.

Well I'm tired of stretching the length of this post so that it seems more epic. Oh, Twitter tweets are limited to 140 characters so all you lazy-to-read twits won't have to worry about having too much to read.

Well, I'm in favour of this sharing and caring movement. I guess we should all be ever-ready to share whatever we want, and everyone should be accepting of anything anyone shares, and by accepting I mean not fly into a rage upon seeing anything we don't agree with. Furthermore, we should be more open and fortunately such issues have entered the zeitgeist thanks to guys like WL. It's heartening to see a large group of people placing their principles of freedom of speech above material desires. Or is this all a big show just to get us to think that it is possible to achieve freedom when in fact we are all still slaves to the rich. Now that's a big conspiracy theory.

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Interesting Points of Interest - I was told to pass on this message:
5/19/13, Expect Us.

Clean Slate

2010-12-20T18:30:00.008+08:00

Ah to have time to breathe again! Today marks the day when the worries of this semester completely come to an end, and I can look forward to the new semester with new goals and new worries. Exams are over, editing of the paper I wrote and presented is complete and just waiting for it to be published as a book chapter, short term deadlines have all been met, and I've passed the written qualifying exam for the PhD candidature. Not bad I think for 6 months' work. I think you might have a pretty good idea how the past 6 months have been for me. Actually you don't even know the half of it.

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Recently I attended a very excellent wedding theme party with Kooty. The theme was Alice in Wonderland.

Today is the first time in many months that I don't really have anything that I need to do. Ya sure I have something that I need to complete soon, besides research work, but that can be completed in half an hour. You can understand why I took so long to blog the party. Now it's no longer fresh in my mind I can't really think of much things to say about it. It was great though. Great, fun, and nice. Oh it was at The White Rabbit at Dempsey Hill.

Do you know the story of Alice in Wonderland? It all begins with the White Rabbit. I don't think it's as great as people make it out to be, I dunno, but if you're not familiar with it then you'll be missing out on a lot of references to it in pop culture. The story itself may not be great, but some interpretations of it are quite impressive when seen on TV or the movies.

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This is the blind guitaring god that wrote the Christmas song Feliz Navidad - Jose Feliciano:

The above is just to bring in a Christmas theme. The video that you really have to see is this one - Jose Feliciano playing Flight of the Bumblebee on guitar:

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Before I end, just thought I should tack the obligatory festive greeting onto this post. So, I'd like to wish everyone a wet Christmas this year, cos in this part of the world that's the best you gonna get, and I don't want to lie to you and give you false hope.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Feliz Navidad is Merry Christmas in Spanish. Tu comprende?

Know Your Meme

2010-12-09T23:03:00.002+08:00

I only know, like, half of the memes mentioned.

"Rickroll"

"Hide your kids hide your wife"

"Double rainbow guy"

"Chocolate rain"

"All your base are belong to us"

"Leeroy Jenkins"

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Interesting Points of Interest - "Can I have a cheeseburger" is a meme too?

Freedom

2010-12-08T19:35:00.004+08:00

NOT trying to stir up any anti-whatever feelings or cause any trouble. Just that, this is a very relevant topic, especially today, but also relevant no matter what. I don't know enough about these stuff to offer an educated opinion, I just find this interesting that's all:

As long as we have food and shelter and some luxuries, is that enough for us to be happy?

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Interesting Points of Interest - I'm not happy that I'm afraid to type certain stuff on here.

Silver Medal, Like Everyone Else

2010-12-05T22:25:00.024+08:00

Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2010

I cannot overstate the joys of running for pleasure. It is like discovering that you're the richest person in the world and everyone in the world loves you and you will live forever.

Take note, you only get runner's high AFTER the run. Just BEFORE the run, you get the urge to take a crap. And DURING the run you feel like dying.

Two French guys dressed as Asterix and Obelix took part in the race, but apparently they didn't drink any magic potion (I thought Obelix was dropped in a cauldron of it as a baby and that is why he's not allowed to have any?).

Here is the 10km finisher's medal:

That photo shows each side of the medal. I don't like the side shown on the left side because it looks like a Singapore souvenir. What's Orchard Road and Sentosa and the Singapore Eye got to do with the marathon?

I think a lot of people will be boycotting next year's marathon because of the sarcastic MC. "Look at those people, walking so fast." Nah, just kidding. Everyone loved him.

I wonder if the people walking around at the shopping malls who didn't take part in the race feel inferior when they see people who just took part in the race. They might be thinking "what am I doing here, wasting time, just walking around, when I could have done something worthwhile". I know I would feel that way if I were the one walking around the shopping mall seeing people who just came from the race.

I always regret having signed up for the race during the days before the race. But after the race, I stop regretting, even when my right foot and right knee are in immense pain when I walk.

Runners can search for their photos taken by the organizers during the run here, by either last name or bib number. I'm not sure if they use computer vision to recognize bib numbers, the bib numbers in some of the images are pretty hard to make out. The website should make the preview images LARGER than 269 x 179 so that people can better decide whether or not to spend $40 on one photo. I'll have to make do (I added the special effects, otherwise they are just low quality normal photos):

Allegedly, some half marathon, 10km runners, and even volunteers, took full marathon finisher's tee shirts, depriving actual full marathon finishers of their tees. If you see someone on the streets wearing the finisher's tee shirt, don't be so quick to shower them with respect (unless you respect sneaky people)! Anyway, this is all hearsay.

Sometimes these things start with "I bet some of the volunteers took the shirts", followed by someone overhearing it as "Some of the volunteers took the shirts", followed by someone repeating it as "Vulture hunters took a shit".

Both men and women winners of the full marathon were Kenyans. Kooty will appreciate that I predicted that. Each of them ran 42.195 km in about 2.5 hours.

Kenyans are not allowed to take part in anything less than a full marathon, according to the laws of their society I made that up.

This 90+ year old girl won the women's 90+ division for the full marathon, with a timing of 7h 55 mins. She may have been the only one in the category, but she still came in first... Here she is:

Looks good. For someone over 90 years old. Note the bib number and check the results for yourself if you don't believe it [click]. I think we have found the true fountain of youth (her blood). But seriously, she ought to be experimented on.

What about myself? How did I do? That's the most important piece of information isn't it? Who cares about some 90 year old girl or the Kenyans? Well, I did BAD. No matter how I did, I would have said that, cos I'm a motivated guy. That's a lie. If my timing was under an hour, I would say GOOD, considering all the issues (stress, lack of sleep, lack of practise, dodgy ankles...). But I ran my skin off and I still took more than an hour. For a mere 10 km!!! For a dude!!!

Here are my stats, based on NET time, not GUN time cos that would be pointless:

The above high resolution picture was taken by the excellent and free service provided by Kooty, and edited by the excellent but not free service of Pushy.

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Interesting Points of Interest - On that day, everyone was a winner, except those who didn't get a medal.

It's That Time Again

2010-12-03T23:06:00.009+08:00

It's that time when I come back after a long hiatus and apologize insincerely for the long absence, because, I don't think any of you care that I never posted for a long time, nor do I think there are that many of you anyway. Just a few thousand readers, why should I bother.

The exams are over but there's still a lot to do. I wanted to study-through-blogging but it was not really possible, but I did prepare lots of diagrams that could be posted. I'll do it gradually I guess, to make it more coherent and readable by adding some stuff.

It has been a REALLY INTERESTING half year. I've been, maybe, four times as busy as the first half, and at least twice as distracted from my primary focus which is studies and research. You know what they say, what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, but I tell you, there have been a couple times these past months that almost killed me.

What I really need now is a break. But where to find the time? I have non-stop work all the way to the 20th of December, which leaves maybe one week of rest before I need to start work again to meet deadlines. One week doesn't sound half bad. In fact it may just be the perfect tonic, and I'm looking forward to it.

I am severely disappointed that I forgot to hire the yacht for our family Christmas party. I didn't really tell them that I was going to do that, so that's not so bad, but it would have been a really nice experience for everyone and a great gift for them. I MUST remember to do it NEXT YEAR, and I KNOW I WILL HAVE MORE TIME THIS TIME NEXT YEAR.

I've started listening to Hindi music, and I think it is the dog's bollocks (excellent). One thing though, the Hindi songs that play on Masti 96.3 FM every day from 5 - 8pm are so good, but those that I find on YouTube can't hold a candle to them. I've found two gems though - My Name is Khan soundtrack and Veer soundtrack. No but those on Masti 96.3 FM, if anyone can point me to that caliber of songs I'd be eternally grateful.

My Name is Khan. What a brilliant movie. No need to care about the really obvious anti-war pro-religious-harmony messages, just watching a SRK who didn't go "full retard" (to be fair, he is diagnosed with Asberger's so he is not retarded) but who plays the greatest guy on earth gives us something worthy to aspire to in life. Khan is a great example of leading purely by example. No risk of being called a hypocrite. It's a love story I guess, not between a man and a woman, but between a man and mankind. He loves everyone he meets, and he shows us what love is, which is that no length is too great for the people whom you truly love. And, he did it all without compromising his religious beliefs (actually he maybe did compromise on one aspect...). Now, don't call me sappy or naive, if you want to go around killing people and being a narrow-minded egocentric douche that should be your right as well.

What kind of world this would be if the goal of everyone is to make everyone else happy. An awesome one.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Would you like to buy that as a poster?

How Images Are Obtained

2010-11-21T11:50:00.014+08:00

In the future, scientists will discover a way to use science to scientifically extract the images directly from your eyes in a scientific manner. In the meantime, a camera is the tool of choice for obtaining images.

Image Sensor

During the film era, light entering a camera reacted with the light-sensitive film being exposed to the light and imprinted an image on the film. Following that, the film could be developed using chemicals to develop the image into a photo.

Nowadays, people use digital cameras, which use light-sensitive sensors to capture an image. The two common types of image sensors in a digital camera are CCD and CMOS. They work by the principle of having elements that are sensitive to light.

CCD - Charged Coupled Device

I'll let my bitchin' diagrams do the talking:

So the amount of light captured by the sensor is converted to electric charge at each pixel, and the amount of electric charge is measured to give us the intensity of each pixel. BUT, that doesn't tell us anything about the colour of the pixel. All this does is give us a grayscale image.

I'll let my bitchin' diagrams tell you how to get colour images:

CMOS - Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor

CMOS just refers to the method of fabricating integrated circuits.

Basically, a CMOS image sensor also uses photosensitive sensors to use light to generate electric charge. The sensor at each pixel is called an Active Pixel Sensor (APS). The difference between a CMOS image sensor and a CCD is that electrical circuitry with lots of transistors and shit is included with the CMOS image sensor that measures the amount of electric charge, converts that to a digital signal, and creates the image. For a CCD, the CCD has one sole purpose which is to sense light and use it to generate electric charge at each pixel. What is done to the electric charge is handled by external circuitry.

There are some implications of having the circuitry together with the sensors rather than separately, in terms of image quality and capture speed. In a nutshell, CCD images tend to have less noise but generates an image more slowly. CMOS image sensors have more noise because of the presence of circuitry together with the image sensors. CMOS generates the image more quickly. Furthermore, CCDs tend to consume much more power than CMOS image sensors, which means battery life of a CMOS image sensor device is much longer than CCD. Which is better? By knowing what I have written and nothing else about image sensors, I say CCD.

Camera Lens Optics Stuff

So the above shows how to find the various pieces of information about an optical system. The distance b1 is the distance from the lens when objects will appear sharp in the image. The distance b1 is affected by the focal length of the lens, which is a measure of how strongly light rays are converged by the lens. The DoF is the range of distance, with b1 in the middle, where objects will still appear sharp. In actual fact, as you move farther from b1, whether towards the lens or away, the objects will appear less and less sharp. The FoV is how wide the angle of the scene that can be seen by the optical system is. Actually, for a 3D scene, there should be two FoVs, one for the horizontal and one for the vertical. So, if you want the vertical FoV, use the height of the image sensor in the calculation instead.

Camera Modeling

Look at the above mess of objects. There are two objects there - the camera, and the object which is the subject of the photo which the camera is taking. They all exist in the world, therefore they are all defined in terms of world coordinates, i.e. in relation to the origin of the world coordinate frame, all objects are translated in x,y,z, and rotated about x,y,z.

But then you are going to take a photo of an object using your camera, so in order to analyse how the image comes about and all that, it would be better to define the object in terms of the camera's coordinate frame. How do we re-define an object, which is defined in world coordinates, in camera coordinates?

First, you find out how much the camera has translated and rotated in relation to the world coordinates. Then you apply the opposite translation and rotation to the object of interest. Why opposite? What you want to do is bring the camera to (0,0,0) in world coordinates (which is the opposite transformation), and you want the object to follow the same transformation so that the position of the object relative to the camera is unchanged. So, you will have the camera at (0,0,0) and the object relatively unchanged BUT coordinates with respect to the camera coordinate frame (which is now (0,0,0)).

So, now, you have the object in terms of the camera coordinate frame. Now all you have to do to know how the object is projected onto the image plane (inside the camera) is to apply a projection transformation to the object. A projection transformation takes 3D points and projects them onto a 2D plane. It turns out, the pinhole camera model is a good approximation for most systems (like 3D computer games), and the pinhole camera model uses a perspective projection, which is like this:

The diagram above shows how to obtain the image coordinates (i.e. position of the pixel) given the 3D coordinates of a point of the object expressed in the camera coordinate frame.

And that's it. Now you know how an image is obtained, starting with the camera, object, and the world, re-defining the object in terms of the camera coordinate frame, and then performing a projection on the re-defined 3D points of the object to get the pixels of the image. Pretty cool huh!

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Interesting Points of Interest - These are hilarious - [The Onion: News in Photos]

Enhance Yourself

2010-11-20T10:12:00.023+08:00

New York:

...............

Singapore:

Remember this? The output image is the enhanced image! Today we are gonna enhance the living shit out of our images!

Contrast Stretching

Contrast stretching stretches the contrast of a certain range of pixel values. In the above diagram, the grayscale pixels in the original image have been stretched from [100,150] to [50,200]. Without the contrast stretching operation, the mapping of input to output pixel is in = out. With contrast stretching, we get the graph to the right of the original mapping, where pixel values from 100 to 150 get spread over 50 to 200. Notice that while this portion gets stretched, the two remaining portions on the top and bottom get squeezed. So, you actually use three transformation functions to do the contrast stretching. Since the functions are linear, they are fairly easy enough to obtain, mathematically and algorithmically. The only thing you need to think about is what pixel values do you want to stretch to what values in order to get the result you want.

Matlab implementation:


function[out] = gyContrastStretching(im, r1, r2, s1, s2)
% stretches pixel values between r1 and r2 to s1 and s2

%preparation
[mx my] = size(im);
out = im;

%get the equations of the three functions (gradient and intercept)
grad_bot = s1/r1;
cept_bot = 0;

grad_mid = (s2 - s1)/(r2 - r1);
cept_mid = s1 - grad_mid*r1;

grad_top = (255 - s2)/(255 - r2);
cept_top = s2 - grad_top*r2;

%transform the pixels according to the three functions
for i = 1:mx
for j = 1:my
 if im(i,j) <> r2
     out(i,j) = grad_top*im(i,j) + cept_top;
 else
     out(i,j) = grad_mid*im(i,j) + cept_mid;
 end
end
end

Gray-Level Slicing

When you want to highlight pixels of a specific gray intensity, you do gray-level slicing.

Pay attention to the new mapping. Notice how the gray levels in the range from 20 - 50 are all mapped to level 245. See how some dark bits of Brad Pitt have become white? The mapping has highlighted those bits. If you want to isolate those parts, then not only do you map that range of gray levels, but you also map all other gray levels to 0.

Matlab Implementation:


function[out] = gyGrayLevelSlicing(im, r1, r2, s)
% highlights a specific gray level range r1-r2 to the level s

%preparation
[mx my] = size(im);
out = im;

%transform the pixels
for i = 1:mx
    for j = 1:my
        if (im(i,j) > r1) && (im(i,j) < r2) 
            out(i,j) = s;
        end
    end
end

hist = zeros(256);
hist2 = zeros(256);

for i = 1:mx
    for j = 1:my
        hist(im(i,j)+1) = hist(im(i,j)+1) + 1;
    end
end

for i = 1:mx
    for j = 1:my
        hist2(out(i,j)+1) = hist2(out(i,j)+1) + 1;
    end
end

Histogram Equalization

Recall that a histogram is a graph of the number of pixels with different pixel intensity levels. For a dark image, the graph will be higher at the lower intensity range, and vice versa for a bright image.

In histogram equalization, we want our image to have as close to the ideal histogram as possible, which is an equal distribution of all pixel intensities:

In reality, it's really hard to get the ideal histogram, or even really close. Best we can do:

As you can see, the mapping or transformation function is not something you can come up with manually. That mapping is actually the integration of the histogram of the original image from intensity level 0 to the intensity level of the pixel you wish to map. Don't ask me why it works, I even tried thinking about it then falling asleep for 3 hours so that my genius friend could come into my dreams to explain it to me (has happened before multiple times), but the shit guy stood me up and I was left hanging high and dry at the coconut grove.

Matlab Implementation:


function[out] = gyHistogramEqualization(im)
% transforms an image to make its histogram constant

%preparation
[mx my] = size(im);
out = im;

%get histogram of original image (a.k.a. pdf of original image)
hist = zeros(256);

for i = 1:mx
  for j = 1:my
      hist(im(i,j)+1) = hist(im(i,j)+1) + 1;
  end
end

%normalize the histogram
hist = hist/(mx*my);

%transform the pixels
for i = 1:mx
  for j = 1:my
      r = im(i,j);
      s = 0;
      for n = 1:(r+1)
          s = s + hist(n);
      end
      out(i,j) = s*255; %un-normalize the pixel intensity
  end
end

Low-Pass Filtering

Now we enter the realm of using masks to transform images. A mask is like a neighbourhood function in that the transformation of the pixel depends on the response of the mask in that neighbourhood. The pixel to be transformed is aligned with the centre of the mask. The other pixels aligned with the other parts of the mask will be multiplied by the value at that part of the mask. The multiplications are then summed up and assigned to the pixel at the centre.

The mask of a low pass filter is like that:

It can be of a different size, but it must be a square and the lengths must or should be an odd number. The value depends on the length. Since in the mask shown above, the length is 5, so the value is 1/(5^2). If the length is 7, the value is 1/(7^2) = 1/49.

What this mask does is it blurs an image. I know, not what CSI usually does, but it does have its uses, for example to smooth a noisy image. What happens essentially is that the mask finds the average of the neighbourhood of pixels and assigns the average to that pixel.

The Matlab Implementation (note the clever way of applying the mask hehe (this is a convolution operation)!):


function[out] = gyLowPassFilter(im)

filter = [(1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25);
          (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25);
          (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25);
          (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25);
          (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25) (1/25)];

%get size of the image
[mx my] = size(im);

%pre-allocate the output
out = zeros(size(im));

%get the filter center coordinates
[fx fy] = size(filter);
c = (fx + 1) / 2;

%do the convolution
for i=1:mx
    for j=1:my
        sum = 0;
        for m=1:fx
            for n=1:fy
                sample_i = i + (m - c);
                sample_j = j + (n - c);
                if (sample_i > 0) && (sample_j > 0) && (sample_i <= mx) && (sample_j <= my)
                   sum = sum + im(sample_i,sample_j)*filter(m,n);
                end
            end
        end
        out(i,j) = sum;
    end
end

out = uint8(out);

High-Pass Filtering

Just as a low-pass filter accomplishes blurring an image, conversely a high-pass filter sharpens an image.. just that.. it accomplishes it a little too well.

The mask used:

Results:

See what I mean? Areas where there are no large differences got really dark, and actually, the areas where there were some differences were only slightly brighter. I had to double the intensity for such areas.

Matlab Implementation:


function[out] = gyHighPassFilter(im)

filter = [(-1/9) (-1/9) (-1/9);
          (-1/9)  (8/9) (-1/9);
          (-1/9) (-1/9) (-1/9)];

%get size of the image
[mx my] = size(im);

%pre-allocate the output
out = zeros(size(im));

%get the filter center coordinates
[fx fy] = size(filter);
c = (fx + 1) / 2;

%do the convolution
for i=1:mx
    for j=1:my
        sum = 0;
        for m=1:fx
            for n=1:fy
                sample_i = i + (m - c);
                sample_j = j + (n - c);
                if (sample_i > 0) && (sample_j > 0) && (sample_i <= mx) && (sample_j <= my)
                   sum = sum + double(im(sample_i,sample_j))*filter(m,n);
                end
            end
        end
        if sum < 0
            out(i,j) = 0;
        else
            out(i,j) = 2*round(sum); %double the output to see it better
        end
    end
end

out = uint8(out);

Median Filtering

This one is pretty cool. It does not involve any mask, but it's still a "hood" operation.

See how the resulting image sort of gets "posterized" ? Ermmm.. like, the smoothing without the blurring, ya know?

Instead of assigning the average of the "hood" to the pixel, it assigns the median of the "hood" to the pixel. If you remember your high school maths, the median of a set of numbers is the middle value if the numbers were arranged from smallest to largest. Don't ask me why that makes the result like that.

Matlab Implementation:


function[out] = gyMedianFilter(im)

%get size of the image
[mx my] = size(im);

%pre-allocate the output
out = zeros(size(im));

%get the filter center coordinates
[fx fy] = size(filter);
c = (fx + 1) / 2;

%do the convolution
for i=1:mx
    for j=1:my
        set = [];
        for m=1:fx
            for n=1:fy
                sample_i = i + (m - c);
                sample_j = j + (n - c);
                if (sample_i > 0) && (sample_j > 0) && (sample_i <= mx) && (sample_j <= my)
                   set = [set im(sample_i, sample_j)];
                end
            end
        end
        out(i,j) = median(set);
    end
end

out = uint8(out);

Edge Enhancement

Back to the masked crusader. This one uses two masks! One mask to detect horizontal edges, and another to detect vertical edges. There are a few different masks to choose from, like the Sobel masks. I used the Prewitt masks:

The mask essentially calculates the derivative of the point in a certain direction. If the point has a large change in value in that direction, then we know it belongs to an edge. Areas with little or no change in value will average out by the mask to near 0. Get the edges detected from each mask and sum the result to get an image with all the edges enhanced (and the rest of the image de-hanced...).

Result:

Matlab Implementation:


function[out] = gyEdgeEnhancement(im)

filter1 = [-1 -1 -1;  0 0 0; 1 1 1];
filter2 = [-1  0  1; -1 0 1;-1 0 1];

%get size of the image
[mx my] = size(im);

%pre-allocate the output
out = zeros(size(im));

%get the filter center coordinates
[fx fy] = size(filter1);
c = (fx + 1) / 2;

%apply filter
for i=1:mx
    for j=1:my
        out(i,j) = 0;
        for m=1:fx
            for n=1:fy
                sample_i = i + (m - c);
                sample_j = j + (n - c);
                if (sample_i > 0) && (sample_j > 0) && (sample_i <= mx) && (sample_j <= my)
                   out(i,j) = out(i,j) + double(im(sample_i,sample_j))*filter1(m,n);
                   out(i,j) = out(i,j) + double(im(sample_i,sample_j))*filter2(m,n);
                end
            end
        end
    end
end

out = uint8(out);

..............

I hope now you will be able to start your own CSI lab and put those posers on the TV shows out of business! Yeeeeaaaahhhh!!

Miami:

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Interesting Points of Interest - Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhh!

Getting Connected

2010-11-17T14:49:00.019+08:00

Truth be told, a black and white image is extremely useful. For instance, you could get a computer to help you count the number of objects in an image. With a black and white image, a computer could give each white or black region of connected pixels a unique label. We, and by "we" I mean they, and by "they" I mean the people who named this thing, call this connected component labeling.

1) Connectivity

4-connected pixels are pixels that are either vertically or horizontally next to each other. 8-connected pixels are pixels that are either vertically or horizontally or diagonally connected to each other. That is all.

2) Connected Component Labeling

Let me axe you a question. How many circles are there in the below picture:

If you're not a savant, then before you've finished counting the computer has already come up with the answer and has nicely labeled each circle for you:

Truth be told, I'm quite proud to say that the above result is achieved using code that I wrote myself (the calculating of the labels that is, not the showing of the image with labels, that one is the vislabels function in Matlab). I'm proud because, as you will soon find out, the concept behind the connected component labeling method is really easy BUT, as you might never find out, writing the program code for it is a mind-melting effort. There are a few different methods of connected component labeling. Since I'm a beginner in this field and also I'm not a hotshot genius programmer, I only implemented the simplest one and even then, I think I did it in such a way that it is even less efficient. My method took about a minute to complete whereas the bwlabel function in Matlab completed instantly. Mine took a minute ok!!!! That is abysmal!!! Anyway.

2.1) The Classical Algorithm

This is the simplest method I was talking about. In this method, the image pixels are scanned twice. In the first scan, they are assigned labels. You can scan an image from left to right on each row, from the top row to the bottom row, or scan in some other order. Lets just assume the left to right, top to bottom order.

Ok now remember, we are dealing with a black and white image here which has been thresholded to separate objects from the background. Now just imagine that we're scanning along the image and it's all background (black pixel) then BOOM we hit an object pixel (white pixel). This is where the algorithm springs into action.

When you hit an object pixel, you check the top and left pixels (here we are using the 4-connected scheme to decide connectivity) which are the pixels which supposedly have been scanned before, if you are scanning from left to right, from the top to bottom row. What do you check for?

If the top and left pixels have not been labeled before (i.e. they are background), you assign the object pixel a new label.

If only one of the top or left pixels are labeled, the pixel takes that label.

If both top and left pixels are labeled, the pixel takes the smaller label AND the two labels are noted as being equivalent.

After the first scan, your black and white image will have the white pixels labeled with various numbers. You will also get a list of pairs of labels which are equivalent to each other. Before we move on to the second scan, we need to merge the equivalence pairs into classes. Each class will contain all the labels that are linked to one another.

Right so once we have the classes, the second scan will proceed to re-label the white pixels so that every label belonging to the same class will be given the same label. And.. voila!

I'm sure, at this point mon ami, there are a few questions plaguing your head, like how did the 6 get turned to a 3? That is the easiest question to answer. Simply, what I did is to add labels like the 6 (I call them standalone labels) as a class to the list of classes. Then, for the re-labeling scan, the classes are indexed, i.e. the first class is class 1, second is class 2, etc, so when re-labeling, the class index is used as the new label. Pretty smart eh?

If you're a programmer, you'd probably be wondering a whole bunch more stuff, just like me when I first learned of this algorithm. For instance, how the hell we gonna merge the equivalence pairs into classes?? Man, that is so, like, tough. Well let me tell you, it's possible. It's easy if you're a mathematician. If not, it's hard but you can achieve it through good old manipulation of programming code as long as you're an ok programmer, but you might, like me, not achieve a very efficient method. It's possible though. Just sit down and start coding and it will come.

A bit more bits of info about the Classical Algorithm - if you do a top-to-bottom for each column from left-to-right scan, then the order of the objects will change accordingly, i.e. sequentially from the top to bottom, from the left-most column to the right-most column. Also, if you use an 8-connected scheme instead of a 4-connected one to test for connectivity, then you will get different results for objects that are ONLY connected diagonally to other objects, i.e. they will be seen as one object instead of two.

2.2) The Space-Efficient Iterative Algorithm

Due to time constraints and motivation/energy constraints, I did not implement this algorithm. Though I think I will soon! It looks pretty easy! I'll explain the idea first.

There is an initialisation step where each pixel is assigned a unique label, i.e. you don't even need to check the previous neighbours. Then, there are two scans to merge the labels so that each connected region has a connected label. The order of the first scan is left-right on each row, from the top row to the bottom row. The order of the second scan is right-left on each row, from the bottom row to the top row. During the scans, the previously scanned neighbours, top and left for the first scan and bottom and right for the second scan, are checked and if the labels of the neighbours are lower, the lowest label is assigned. The two scanning directions ensures that all neighbhours are looked at and after the two scans, all objects should have a single unique label.

Ok, it seems incomplete, this algorithm. The labels are not sequential from 1 to the number of objects. As I said, I did not implement this algorithm in code myself so I haven't really figured out the minor details. Off the top of my head, I can think of one solution to fix this problem which is to go one more scan to re-label everything from 1 to X. The real good thing about this algorithm is you don't need to bother about equivalence pairs, which, for a large image with many objects, could be quite a lot and it will take a lot of work merging all those pairs into classes.

I really... riddle me this: why bother to learn the Classical method when this method seems so much better...

..................

You might like to see some of his other videos too.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Managed to squeeze out two extra labels for this post from that video!

Flirting With Death

2010-11-17T09:15:00.006+08:00

Selamat Hari Raya Haji! This festival, more officially known as Eid al-Adha, celebrates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael to God. Just as he was about to pull the trigger though, God stopped him. This documentary excerpt should explain this story better:

The documentary claims that Isaac is the son who was supposed to be sacrificed, but according to Islamic views it was actually Ishmael who was supposed to be sacrificed.

Talking about sacrifices, well, this British journalist and author, Alan Shadrake, got himself into a whole heap of trouble so that a whole bunch of people (including myself) could get wind of his new book, Once A Jolly Hangman, that has been unofficially banned (taken out of circulation from stores at the behest of a certain authority) in Singapore and got him slapped with a $20,000 fine and 6 weeks in the slammer (I'm not kidding about the slammer either).

I'd never even heard of this book before learning of all this from the news. Well, my heart bleeds for Alan and all that, I mean, who'd have thought writing a book could get a brother thrown into the big house. But now it's got me interested in this book that supposedly casts an unflattering light on Singapore's justice system and its death penalty in particular. It's even been (unofficially) banned, this has got me really really interested...

We bloggers must be careful with what we say, for even writing the wrong stuff on your blog can get you the noose in this country (well not the noose but the slammer). Actually, this book is pretty old news, but this day just reminded of things that you might merely say or write that could get you in very big trouble. In time to come, things that you merely think about could get you in trouble, isn't that right? I think a device that can read what a person is thinking is feasible. If you are not supposed to say or write certain things, what's to stop them from making it illegal to think certain things as well. And when I say "them", I mean... cats.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Another book that was "taken out of circulation" is Escape from Paradise. Interesting, why it was taken out of circulation.

I Thought I Got It Out Of My System

2010-11-16T00:07:00.005+08:00

But no it's still in there, along with a cold, and a bunch of other stuff. I wanted to Blend something, but I ended up going to YouTube to look at other people's blends. Take a gander at this masterpiece:

Better yet, go to YouTube and watch it in full HD. Even better, go to here and download the best quality one!

Well I got done for speeding, slapped with a $150 fine and given 6 days in the slammer (nah just kidding about the slammer). I rather like this "criminal lingo" though, it's almost enough to pull me into the scene. Good thing I wasn't packing heat or I'd have busted a cap in that blasted trafpol and his goddamn speed camera, provided I had eyed them in the first place, and that I actually do own a piece. Truth be told, my police scanners picked up nary a hint of police activity. And now I'm just mixing criminal lingo with some sort of classical English slang or something. I mean, can't a brother take his whip out for a ('spin' is too common) scorch down the freeway the way a freeway is meant to be used without being busted by the filth?

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Interesting Points of Interest - I aim to use more slang in my writing

Getting It Out Of My System

2010-11-14T20:44:00.007+08:00

I have a report due tomorrow, but I cannot stand it any longer, I just had to get it out of my system. No it's not the pork curry I had yesterday. It's the desire to Blend.

I have been wanting to Blend since ages ago. Today I finally had both the inspiration to go ahead and do something, albeit a quick and easy one. This one took me a couple of hours. Modeling is easy, it's getting the material properties of the metal and the stone. I don't think they're even close to perfect but whatever, I don't have much time. Have to get back to work.

Oh inspiration from where then? Someone shared this nice song and music video, take a gander:

Recently, well not recently but it's only recently (like now) I've decided to acknowledge this, there seems to be more and more things in our environment urging us to challenge convention, go against the grain and all that. It's a rebel culture now, having opinions and a distinctive style and all that. Artists are cool and there are all sorts of artists popping up all over the place, expressing themselves in ways you could never imagine. Sometimes you feel that we are being sold this rebel culture by big companies and while artists get inspired, followers just buy the stuff.

But there has also been an undercurrent of rebellious attitudes towards all the things in life we take for granted. By the way, we've been taught in Singapore never to start a sentence with "but" but I see nothing wrong with it. You are supposed to replace "but" with "however" if you want to start a sentence like that. How dumb is that.

Anyway, yeah the undercurrent of... I believe such feelings have been around since probably the early 20th century or even before, and I believe a lot more people than I realize also harbour such feelings but it's something not often discussed in social situations. But I also believe it's not a majority of people who feel this way. Or maybe it is (whenever I think I have a unique point of view, I always then assume I'm not that special and most probably the majority has had the same point of view at one time or another), but not many people are doing anything about it.

I mean, what can you do, you gotta live right. You gotta go to work, send the kids to school, follow fashion, act normal, walk on the pavements, watch TV, save for old age, obey the law, and pretend that you're free.

Things that articulate well what I've been feeling since secondary school:

So why didn't I just quit school and do what I loved? Cos there wasn't really anything I was particularly interested in or very good at. Really, the hobbies and interests I had in primary school were destroyed by pressures to study and compete and do well in the PSLE (which used to decide what secondary school you get to go to, I dunno about now), which I didn't do well in anyway, not as well as the people who pressured me would have liked.

And so here I am stuck in academia cos I'm not good at anything else. And I'm not even good at being an academic. I have no patience to read, and I can't understand the stuff I do read, unless maybe after I've read it 10+ times, or maybe never. And I can't remember stuff. I hate memorising stuff for exams too, I rather learn by understanding (that's one of my core principles) but it seems like rote learning is very much encouraged in Singapore, and it's not like I understand the little bit of stuff that I do read. Not that I'm not liking life in academia, but, there are a lot of things not to like about it, unless you can ignore those stuff, just get through it and concentrate on the real stuff, the research, which is what I'm trying to do.

I would like to meet some of the people who live off the grid though. The people who don't go to work, send the kids to school, follow fashion, act normal, walk on pavements, watch TV, save for old age, and obey the law. Maybe then I could follow suit and be free, at least some of the time.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Whoa looks like I got more than one thing out of my system, including that pork curry.

Things

2010-11-05T00:59:00.011+08:00

Things that are considered cool and intellectual to hate:

1) Religion.
2) Dogs wearing clothes.
3) Windows.
4) Mac.
5) Children.
6) The Matrix sequels.
7) Star Wars Episodes 1-3.
8) Justin Bieber.

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Things that are necessities to people in the developed world:

1) Internet.
2) Cell phone.
3) Insurance.
4) Bank account.
5) "Me" time.
6) Education.
7) Different clothes.
8) Certain self-image presented to others.

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Things that people believe without checking:

1) Crocs are good for your feet.
2) Second-hand smoking is worse than first-hand smoking.
3) Charities spend donations properly.
4) You get what you pay for.
5) Whatever the salesman says just because he looks honest.
6) Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius.
7) Canned drinks have way too much sugar.
8) People do bad things because they are bad.

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I just thought I needed a bit of perspective. I just thought I was beginning to get sucked into the here and now and therefore feeling different from before and feeling out of sorts. Apparently... no.

In other news, I had a great time out with Kooty and a great friend from the lab and his great wife. First, braving the evening public holiday eve rush hour traffic at the heart of the city to pick up the great wife, then we went to Sim Lim Square to deal with $%#$#@$ act like they know it all geek ah-bengs because the great friend needed to purchase a graphics card for... ok i cannot divulge too much cos nvm. Nevermind I won't go into the details of the story this time, anyway I think if you've been to Sim Lim Square before you'd know what I'm talking about, and if you ever went shopping for computers or electronics before and you're not a geek you'd also encounter shop staff with pretty bad attitudes.

The shop in question starts with an F and has been around for very long and seems very popular but maybe it's just cos it's conveniently located at the first floor of the computer floors and it's right outside the lift. It's because of that that my friend only visited that shop the first time he went to SLS to check out the graphics cards.

Oh but we had a great time at a 西北 Chinese restaurant. My friend secretly went to pay the bill and insisted on treating Kooty and I. The bill would have come up to about $100 or so. I insisted on paying our share at first but he wouldn't hear of it. So I said I'll bring them out next time for a treat. He was grateful for my bringing him out to SLS and all that but it didn't warrant such a treat. But it's a gesture on his part and I don't think I should refuse it. However, saying I'll bring them out next time might make him feel like he has forced us to return the treat with another treat. But I genuinely had a great time and look forward to going out for a good dinner with them again soon. So, what's the correct protocol? Just say the one I did and lets move on shall we.

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MOCK THE WEEK THINGS

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Deepavali is a Hindu festival, also known as The Festival of Lights.

From skimming through some articles, I gather that the Hindu calendar is lunisolar, like the Chinese calendar, and works in quite a similar way as the Chinese calendar in that there are repeated months and all that. I wish I know more about the origins of Deepavali and also about the calendar, but I have no time right now to go into that. Hence, I will remain ignorant and apathetic towards Deepavali for now.

** That photo is not what I meant by Nice. By the time I finished my work in school and got to Little India all the lights were off and there was virtually nobody on the streets!!! The ONE time I want Little India to be bustling with activity!! **

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Interesting Points of Interest - "The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf."

Cure for a Heavy Heart

2010-10-30T12:29:00.008+08:00

This just in (over one and a half years ago): The cure for a heavy heart is to do something you love.

Over to you Jim to explain this obvious solution:

You don't even have the patience to watch a three-minute news video. It's not your fault, you're just not in that kind of mood at the moment in this fast-paced world.

The video is about 11-year-old Aaron whose twin brother Eric died of brain cancer. Aaron suffered from depression as a result. His doctor prescribed him a dose of baking cookies. He discovered he loved to bake and so his doctor asked him to start a baking company. And that is how the famous Doughjangles bakery got started. Aaron is so busy baking and selling his cookies now that he has two cars and has no time to be depressed. And since he is only 11, retirement is a long way away so there's lots of time to figure out a permanent solution to the depression.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Meme of the day: Successful Black Man.

The Home Stretch Won't Be The Same Anymore

2010-10-29T23:32:00.003+08:00

I thought I'd better say something cos I'm feeling emotional and it's good to let your emotions out otherwise it could eat at you eat and eat and eat and eat until you're nothing but skin and an empty core of worn out feelings that don't matter anymore and you may well end up an apathetic sociopath and go on a killing spree before ending up on death row until a war breaks out and the new leaders set all the death row prisoners free as a gesture of goodwill. Therefore it's good to let your emotions out.

Ermmmmmm..... Hamish Brown, the DJ of Gold 90.5FM in charge of "The Home Stretch" every weekday from 9 to 5pm. Actually I never listened to radio until the CD player in the car accidentally got 2 CDs jammed into it through no fault of my own. And when I first started listening to Gold 90.5FM, I felt that they talked too much and didn't play enough music. And how can you promise me the songs that I want, cos that is impossible unless you have every song ever written and even those that I wrote myself and never shared with anyone. However, I listen to Gold 90.5FM most of the time cos they play the songs I like most consistently, like maybe 85% hit rate compared to the 100% hit rate of my mix CDs. You should get some of my mix CDs, they're awesome.

Tonight was Mr Brown's last night on the air and I felt sad. His jokes weren't the funniest and his laugh was a little creepy, but, he was there through all my trials and tribulations, through my doubts and frustrations, in my violence and my turbulence, through my fear and my confessions, and my anguish and my pain, through my joy and my sorrow, in the promise of another tomorrow, he will never come back, but he was there. And just like how I came to view the group of friends in Friends and the group of friends in Seinfeld, who were there through all my trials and... he, too, became like one of these one-way friends that brought me comfort. And even though his jokes weren't the funniest (I have to repeat), I will still miss him cos, isn't that what love is? I mean, when you get to know the real person inside, it doesn't matter how you find the person inside, as long as the person inside is the same guy as the person outside, then I think it's natural to love the person for who he is, because that is him, and he is he, through all his trials and tribulations...

This tribute is sincere. Maybe it's cos I have been out of sorts lately or maybe I am sincerely gonna miss him or maybe it's a bit of both, but even though I might be rambling on and on about some rubbish about trials and tribulations... I'm sincere. 11.32pm.

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Interesting Points of Interest - To his honey: he is going home.

Fantastic Mr. Soundtrack

2010-10-28T13:51:00.004+08:00

I have been out of sorts lately, for undisclosed reasons that will remain so. But today I fell in love with the Fantastic Mr. Fox soundtrack album, especially two songs in particular. Have a gander with your ears:

Have you seen the movie? Fantastic Mr. Fox I mean? It was a brilliant way to spend 1.5 hours and $9.50 at the cinema, and many more hours at home watching the DVD. The best feel-good film ever without making you feel guilty for feeling good. The stop-motion animation is highly cute and adorably stylistic. In many ways, Mr. Fox reminds me of an older me, and the young fox Ash reminds me of a younger me, and Ash's cousin Kristofferson reminds me of a me in some situations. I think the first part of the movie is more fun and light-hearted than the second part, but the second part still serves to complete the movie in a nice and meaningful way. But the movie would not even be half as fantastic I think without the fantastic soundtrack.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Saw a bear comb his hair...

Business As Usual

2010-10-17T23:42:00.005+08:00

Sigh.

Oh so ever since I came back from Korea my computer started dying slowly. Well not the computer but I wasn't sure what but I had an idea. At first, the video signal would stop after a few hours of using the computer. When the video signal stops, the computer monitor would go off and it will say something like "no signal" or something. This would happen to both the monitors that were connected to my video card (GeForce 9400GT). Sometimes, if I happened to be playing a video or music at the time, the sound might also get locked in a loop of about a millisecond of the sound.

As the days went by the frequency of this occurrence increased steadily, until it came to the point where the moment I turn on the computer, the video goes off immediately. In a nutshell, I unplugged ALL my devices (they're mostly all connected to the PC in some way), did a lot of re-arranging, bought a new power strip, and switched out the GeForce 9400GT for my old GeForce 7950GT. Now my computer is like new. The graphics performance of the 7950GT is way better than the 9400GT I realised. I mean, the 7950GT needs to have a power cable plugged into it ok! The problem now is that the second monitor has no blue colour component! I'm not sure, it could be the pin-mapping of the DVI-VGA converter.

Also, now all the USB ports of my computer work perfectly)! The back 4 ports, the front 2 ports, the port on my keyboard, the 2 ports on my monitor, and the 4 ports on the USB hub. Before that, the back ports would not work for my external hard disk, and one of the back ports would not work for my mouse and keyboard. So I highly suspect that the old power strip was causing problems as well. I suspect that it is the old power strip that caused my cable TV box to die like every 6 months, and my router to die like every year, oh and I have even had a cable modem die too.

Even better, in re-arranging all my stuff, now everything is on a table and nothing is on the floor and there are no more wires and cables on the floor! It's like a new computer and new room. I just thought it's so great now that I have to share it with you.

Sigh.

Exams are coming, project deadlines are coming, research work still has to be continued, and life still has to go on. I will be doing the study-by-blogging thing, so expect a post or two... hundred. No la not two hundred. I estimate about 10 or so. I mean does it really matter how many posts it's gonna be? There will be as many posts as there will be ok? Don't ask so much, especially if it's not gonna affect you so much. Oh you gonna cry now? See if I care. But I do care la. Crying people make me sad, unless they're crying because they're happy, then it makes me happy and depending on the reason, it might make me so happy that I might almost cry too. But not for some stupid reason like maybe I dunno they're happy because the guy in the show got together with the girl. No, it has to be a reason like maybe I dunno someone you really treasure and care about expresses how he/she knows how much you really treasure and care about him/her I dunno it's just a hypothetical scenario get over it but it sounds touching though doesn't it unless you treasure and care about no one like the heartless beast you are then I'm sorry to say my friend you're emotionally stunted but hey maybe you want to be emotionally stunted I mean there are benefits like you don't get too sad or depressed about anything so why not but you're also probably missing out on a really interesting/great/exciting part of life that, really, money just can't buy I mean when something affects you so deeply that you feel it inside you you can't just go out and buy something to get that well maybe you can what do I know iknownothingreallyionlyknowwhatiknowwhichmaywellbeall wrongandyouprobablyshouldn'tlistentomeor maybejusttakewhatisaywithapinchofsaltcoswhylistentosomeonewhocouldbewrongbutthenwhoisright? howdoyouknowwhototrust? howdopeopleevenknowthattheythemselvescanbetrusted? sotheybelievestronglyinsomethingbuthowcandtheyknowthattheirbeliefiscorrect?isthereevensuchathingasacorrectbelief? areyoustillreading? THE GAME

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Interesting Points of Interest - You lost.

Jeodora Wasseoyo Part 2

2010-10-17T12:51:00.019+08:00

Hanyang Park

This is where it starts to get good. I stumbled upon this place on the way to 63 Building. I had put off going to 63 Building until the last day because some ke ja shik ($#@%#&^) said that N Seoul Tower is better than 63 Building. Anyway.

Hanyang Park was a very familiar-looking place for me because I saw it in The Host. I'm sure it has been featured in many Korean movies and programs as well. It has a wonderful breeze and great aroma of the Han River. And, it has a great view of the imposing 63 Building.

63 Building

This building has a rather weird name. Anyway, it has 63 floors, 3 underground floors, and 60 above-ground.

I got a bit confused about how to go up to the top floors of the building. I saw that the top few floors had names - 60 was Sky Art, 59 was Walk in the Clouds, and so on. To view the Sky Art gallery, you had to buy a ticket. So ok, I thought I'd go to Walk in the Clouds. Then I went to the lifts but there was some sort of gantry ticket thing. I asked the guy to let me in cos I wanted to "Walk in the Clouds". He said something in Korean and "ti-ket". So fine, I bought the ticket and went back to him. But I couldn't go in from there, I guess those lifts are only for the office people (even though they go all the way to the 60th floor). I had to use the art gallery entrance and lift from another location.

So you can only go to the top floor of the building and pretend you want to view their art gallery there in order to look at the view from up there. What an obvious con job by these people, just charge the admission to the top floor if you want, don't disguise it as a lousy art gallery. But logically, you get better value by paying for the art gallery instead of just the view so maybe I should not complain. But the art in the gallery was really ordinary. Anyway. I bought the ticket and went up.

Seoul

I think Hanyang Park and the view from 63 Building managed to just make the trip worthwhile.

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In the end, what is the one thing about South Korea (or just Seoul) that would make people (or just me) visit it or even migrate to it? Singapore has laksa, India has food, Japan has culture, New Zealand and South Africa have different types of scenery. What about South Korea? There are a lot of bridges... ya.... No. I think the thing about South Korea is modernism.

The people, the city, the entire culture is very forward-thinking. The city is highly modern, with lots of digital facilities and gadgets to entertain and guide and aid people. Some of it is not very well-implemented but at least it is there and things can only get better. Digital information and communication pervades almost everything in the city. And all this without totally compromising on the other important stuff like nature, fun, happiness, good-naturedness. What would make me come back would be the chance to see how much further the city has progressed without worry of not being able to fit in or being ostracised, and believe me there will be progress as they have lots of new stuff in the pipeline.

I also found out that you can put a positive spin on anything. "Modernism". Psh yea right. You will probably never get my true feelings about South Korea because I myself am not sure about it. As I said, the city will still progress which means it is a work-in-progress which means it might be better to judge it when it is a finished product.

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Interesting Points of Interest - A complex city deserves a complex and deep post.

Jeodora Wasseoyo Part 1

2010-10-17T12:03:00.013+08:00

N Seoul Tower

I had heard that the view from N Seoul Tower was the best view of Seoul you could find. Up front I will say, at least at night cos that's when I visited it, that it's not great. It should be good, being the tallest point and all that, but it's not. Maybe because the glass in the tower is too stained by hand prints and oily prints. The glass also reflected a lot of the inside of the tower which interfered with a lot of the view. And the view from the area outside the tower is blocked by trees. In any case, here are some pictures:

Obviously, I only picked the photos with the least of the problems that I listed above. I managed to mitigate the reflection problem by hanging my outer shirt over the camera to block the light from behind. A tripod stand is absolutely necessary to take pictures like this at night.

I have seen extremely nice night shots taken by other people. I'm not sure, maybe I need a better lens, or better camera, or special processing technique. Anyway.

N Seoul Tower - you have to pay admission fee to go up to the top. There is a bear museum in the building as well but we didn't bother to go. The tower can only be accessed by bus or cable car. We took the cable car and then walked back to the subway station. Here's some photos I took along the way to the subway:

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Nice weather, so-so food (except for the BBQ), nothing special to see in shops and markets, nothing special to say about anything really. The city is very well-covered by the subway which is really user-friendly - anytime you're stuck inside you just crawl under the gantry. The other day my parents and I were going to take the subway together. We weren't sure which direction to go because it was one of those stations where you enter the different directions from different gantries. I wanted to go see the map but my mom asked the guy there instead, and he opened the gate and let us in without scanning our card. Immediately I sensed trouble but I let it go. When I got to my stop (my parents were going to another stop), I could not scan out since I never scanned in, so, another trip under the gantry was necessary. I think that's three times I've had to do that.

Anyway, nothing special to speak of. In the city at least, the Korean culture is not perceptible at all. You know what I mean, like in Japan you know you're in Japan. In Seoul, apart from hearing people speak Hangukmal (Korean language), you wouldn't be able to tell you're in Korea if you had been dropped from a plane with your memory erased (it happens).

And this is the mindset I had going into the last day of my stay in Korea. I decided to drop all work and just spend the whole day trying to salvage the trip by looking for the one thing that would make the trip worthwhile. Every country has that one thing you know. Singapore has laksa, India has the food in general, New Zealand has the scenery, South Africa has the scenery, Japan has the culture. Korea? So far I couldn't find that one thing.

Chyeonggyecheong

The first place I went to on the last day was a stream which has some historical value and had recently been restored to be a scenic and calm walkway through the city. On the "artist's impression" of the restoration, it looks really beautiful. When I was actually there, it looks like a place that can't decide whether it wants to be man-made or natural. The landscaping seems very wild yet there are many man-made features like stone footpaths across the stream, stone walls, artificial waterfalls, etc. In the end it looks slightly nicer than a canal.

I caught a glimpse of something familiar from Singapore near Chyeongyecheong:

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Interesting Points of Interest - To be continued...

Infinitely Mine

2010-10-12T19:11:00.009+08:00

I didn't do much walking around the last few days. I took the subway instead. Really user-friendly the subway. The first time, I scanned my ticket at the gantry and I dunno what happened it wouldn't open and then I scanned it again and it said "this ticket has been used" and I pressed the button for help but none came so I had to crawl under the gantry. The second time, I lost my ticket and... crawled under the damn gantry again. The third time I had to scan out to get to the other direction of the same line cos I missed a stop cos the train was so crowded that I couldn't see outside and not all trains announce the stations in english and not all subway maps have english names, but when I tried to scan in again it said "this ticket has been used"... so I had to buy a new ticket. I think, now, I've finally got the hang of the subway.

Sijang (market)

This Namdaemun Sijang in Jung-gu is probably the largest market in Seoul. They sell a lot of things here. Notice I said a lot of things, I didn't say a lot of different types of things. They have hundreds of shops selling the same souvenirs, clothes, accessories, seaweed thing. If this is a "must-see" thing in Seoul, then, em... then it shouldn't be.

So maybe I thought better go somewhere that is not so "touristy". So I thought go to Hwayang Sijang in Gwangjin-gu right? Here it is:

Maybe they think that as long as they hang those international flags over the street that it becomes a market? Well the first market in Songpa-gu is still the best.

Technomart

During my explorations on the first day I saw this giant Technomart in Gangbyeong also in Gwangjin-gu. I thought it would be the Sim Lim Square of Korea i.e. Kim Lim Square. There are like 5 or 6 huge floors of hundreds of small shops ALL SELLING DIGITAL SAJINGI (CAMERA) and a bit of mp3 players and phone protectors etc. Imagine a building, bigger than Sim Lim Square, called Technomart, selling all digital cameras.

Nightlife

Nightlife in Korea, or at least Songpa-gu is significantly more interesting than the sijang. Lots and lots of little restaurants open pretty late around the hotel area. We had a BBQ pork thing at one of the restaurants and it was really really really good. You cook the pork and put it in some sort of leaf and put all sorts of sauces and condiments and spices and stuff on it and wrap it up and eat it with rice and they give you some soup to drink and I don't know how much it is cos I went back to the hotel to do my work before my Dad paid for the dinner.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Restaurants are something that there cannot be too much of.

Ann Yeong

2010-10-10T15:33:00.016+08:00

What am I doing in South Korea in the middle of the school term. I'm here for school stuff so it's ok. It's not so ok cos I'll miss one lesson cos of this school stuff in Seoul. And I still have two projects to complete and three exams to study for and this school stuff in Seoul is unrelated to the projects and exams. But it's ok cos this Seoul school stuff is an experience money can't buy. Will tell you (whomever you are) more about the school stuff maybe next time or maybe never.

I came to Seoul on Friday with some work to do by Sunday and some by Tuesday. I aimed to finish everything by Saturday but failed. Instead, I went out on Saturday to get a feel for the place. I like to spend the first day in a foreign country just going out to get a feel for how to get around and what is available and all that.

In many ways, Seoul feels like Fukuoka but on a much grander scale (Seoul is the capital after all). Buildings and houses near the city centre are slightly less beautiful and well-integrated than Fukuoka. Apart from Korean eumsik (food), Japanese and Western eumsik is also very common. Korean eumsik in hanguk (Korea) is really masitneun (good), and everything comes with kimchi, which I don't really like. Korean food is usually spicy which I find surprising because I never had any spicy Korean food in Singapore. Another surprising fact is that ho tel (hotel) rooms in Korea are way more advanced than in Japan (or maybe just in Fukuoka). But it's not so surprising if you consider that this is Seoul, baby. I have read about Seoul in various literature. It is a highly advanced city and they're really into "smart" environments.

Hotel: Hotel David (Seoul) vs Fukuoka

Computer in room: Seoul 1 - 0 Fukuoka

Entertainment centre (computer) with network access to a moderate library of movies:
Seoul 2 - 0 Fukuoka

Hot and cold water dispenser in room: Seoul 3 - 0 Fukuoka

5.1 surround sound: Seoul 4 - 0 Fukuoka

Big screen plasma TV: Seoul 5 - 0 Fukuoka

Jacuzzi in bath tub: Seoul 6 - 0 Fukuoka

Full toiletries and grooming accessories provided: Seoul 7 - 0 Fukuoka

Bidet with "blow-dry" function: Seoul 8 - 0 Fukuoka

Whoa forgot to mention one more!
Single remote control to control everything in the room (aircon, lights, tv...):
Seoul 9 - 0 Fukuoka

Hotel David - close to Sincheon subway station, two stops away from Gangnam-Gu. We (parents and I) might have caught a lucky break about the hotel business because we were originally booked into the very nearby Plex Hotel (less than SGD80 per night) but because of construction works in the basement, they were worried we would find it too noisy so they gave us rooms at Hotel David instead at no extra charge.

Songpa-gu

The hotel is located in Songpa-gu. Seoul is divided into 25 Gu.

Some of these birds can be found in and around a park in Songpa-gu:

An international market can be found in Songpa-gu. It opens in the late morning. They generally sell fruits, meat, kimchi, clothes, lingerie, kimchi, and kimchi here. Parents went there earlier than me, told me there were many things to see and good place to take photographs. I walked up and down the market twice in five minutes and took these two photos:

By the way, I've slightly changed my photography style. Now I only shoot in RAW mode (no JPG) and I only take one or two shots of the same scene. As long as it looks decent on the camera playback, I believe it will be good enough to manipulate in RAW mode in photoshop to get what I want. This way, it's way more efficient to sort through and edit. This is the style I adopted after the first day.

I also took a walk towards Gangnam-gu and took a few interesting pictures:

No doubt a relic from the 1988 Seoul Olympics

No doubt they were trying to capture the spirit of the ancient Greeks with this one

Jamsil Olympic Stadium - Home of Seoul United FC

Gangnam-gu

This is a really impressive part of the city. Many large companies have offices and buildings here. It's right next to Songpa-gu. I managed to walk to it even though they're connected by jihacheol (subway).

The bridge from Songpa-gu to Gangnam-gu

COEX - The Suntec City of South Korea

Reflection of a Hana Bank sign

Solar power to charge the battery during the nal (day) to light the lamp at bam (night)

COEX Mall - big syopingmal (shopping mall), camera-related stuff and Faceshop is relatively cheap here compared to Singapore

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Interesting Points of Interest - ann yeong (hello (informal))

It Don't Matter If It's Black and White

2010-10-02T19:00:00.019+08:00

This post is like a sequel to this post maybe.

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A grayscale image is a map of pixels of various intensity values of gray. Normally, in a digital image, each pixel is represented by intensity values from 0 to 255, thus each pixel will take 1 byte of memory (which is 8 bits, which can represent values from 0 to 255).

For a colour image, the usual representation is by three components - red, green, blue - each component having intensity values from 0 to 255. This means a colour image will require three times the memory of a grayscale image.

The larger the size of the image, the slower any computer processing is gonna be, and sometimes it's not necessary to work with colour or even grayscale images. Maybe you just wanna extract certain information from the image like determine if an object is present. Then maybe all the computer needs is a pure black and white image - a binary image.

What did I do to MJ? I converted his photo to a binary image. See how all the bright pixels became white and all the darker pixels became black. I mean really, a binary image of MJ is still as awesome as the coloured one, and much easier on the memory space and computational requirements of a computer.

The process of converting a colour or grayscale image to a binary image is called thresholding. Normally, the colour image is first converted to grayscale. A colour image being made of red-green-blue components, each pixel of the grayscale counterpart is just the average of the red-green-blue components ((red+green+blue)/3). Then from the grayscale image, you do this:

So then the problem becomes: what threshold value to choose? Some methods:

Manually select by gut feeling or trial and error
Construct a histogram of the image and choose a value based on that
Use a lot of mathematical modeling based on the histogram and other information/assumptions and choose a value based on that
Use a lot of mathematical modeling...... assumptions and choose a different value for each pixel based on the value of pixels around it

The first one is easy but could be time-consuming and might not get the optimal result. The second one is faster but result-wise, still better to look and see. Third one could be difficult but it will be better and faster if there are many photos of varying conditions and you wanna automate the process. The fourth one is the same as the third one except that it would give even better results in general.

For the second method, choosing a threshold value would be really easy if you get a histogram like that:

Just choose a threshold value somewhere in between the two peaks.

I actually used the third method in Matlab for MJ, cos I wanna get an automated way thresholding. There are many established ways to do the third method but I was too lazy to learn any of them, so I've tried to come up with one of my own. Here's a summary:

So the top left graph is the histogram of the image. The histogram is approximated to a 3rd order polynomial curve which would basically give what you see in the top right graph. So this kind of curve will give two turning points in the histogram. Recall the ideal histogram, so what we want is to choose a threshold value somewhere near or on the minimum turning point i.e. the valley of the two peaks, not the maximum turning point which is the top of the peak. To get the minimum turning point, we differentiate the 3rd order polynomial curve to get the bottom left graph, and from there we can find the two turning points and do a little bit of testing on the top right graph to find the minimum turning point. The intensity value that corresponds to that turning point will be chosen as the threshold.

I'm actually pretty proud of this piece of work. This is my own method (in that I'm not aware of anyone else who has done this but probably many people have come up with better methods) but I'm not so naive to think that it will work on not-so-awesome pictures like non-MJ ones. So here's some tests on other pictures:

The above picture gives the below result.

The above picture gives the below result.

The above picture gives the below result.

Notice how, for the above picture, the smoothed histogram has only one turning point and its at the peak? This method isn't built for that, but, the result turns out good. This is quite serendipitous. It turns out that the Matlab code I wrote assigns the maximum turning point as the threshold if the minimum can't be found, so for pictures like that, the turning point is somewhere in the middle of the spread of pixel intensities and this gives a pretty equal spread of whites and blacks in the binary image.

So far so good right? Well, keep that champagne bottle and Nobel Prize for thresholding in the cabinet a little while longer cos...

Don't blame my method. That is a baaaad picture to begin with. Use my contrast stretching method for pictures like that! What happened is that this picture is too dark, so the minimum turning point of the smoothed histogram isn't really a good representation of a valley between two peaks as there is only one peak and a small protuberance. So this method ain't quite so robust after all.

Another thing, for the cat one, the method did not really actually bring out the cat very well (assuming that is what you want). Maybe some sort of colour thresholding would work better. I wrote a little method for that too but maybe I'll share it next time!

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Interesting Points of Interest - If you're thinkin' of bein' my brother it don't matter if you're black and white.

O'Malley the Engin Cat

2010-09-27T20:40:00.005+08:00

This is an old song from Disney which I like:

This is the new cat at the Faculty of Engineering at NUS:

This made me laugh today:

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Interesting Points of Interest - Verbosity is the enemy of Interesting Points of Interest, but you might not have guessed it.

How to Make Electronics Work for You

2010-09-25T01:02:00.023+08:00

I am excited about something but I won't tell you what.
I am anxious about something but I won't tell you what.
I am worried about something but I won't tell you what.
I am nervous about something but I won't tell you what.

But I will tell you this:

But enough about me. Actually I wanna tell you this:

Because I tell you, once you know how to do this, you'll be able to do a lot of stuff and also give yourself more opportunities to start a fire or kill yourself. Well, not unless you do it right.

The basis of all electronics is that current flows from a higher voltage to a lower voltage.

Current is the transporter of energy that all devices use to do their work. If you run a current through a device, if the current is high enough, the device will work. If the current is too high, the device might get too hot, its electrical components might burn, and you might start a fire or kill yourself.

The stuff that electrical current flows along and through are conductors. Conductors like wires are materials that allow electrical current to flow through them. Anything along the conductor that takes energy from the current is called a load. Loads add resistance to a conductor, which is something that hinders the current flow. A resistance between two points will cause a voltage drop from one point to the other in the direction of current flow. If your body is the load, you might just kill yourself.

Voltage is measured in terms of volts (V). Current is measured in terms of amperes (A). Resistance is measured in terms of Ohms (Ω). Currents of 0.01A or more can injure you, and above 0.1A might kill you (especially if it runs through your heart), regardless of voltage. Believe me, I've tried. No wait I haven't. If you try, you might kill yourself.

The "higher voltage" voltage is supplied by a power source. The "lower voltage" voltage would be connected to a ground, usually the ground terminal of the power source. The amount of current drawn from the power source is determined by the resistance between the two voltage points using the formula:

Electronics are represented using circuit diagrams. Power sources and loads or resistors (resistors are electronic components that are specifically used to add resistance to a circuit) are represented by these symbols:

I should say that the above symbol for power source is for DC power source. If you're a beginner, you're gonna wanna stick to using DC power sources for now, which means batteries and DC adaptors to plug into the wall. And for this post, we're only gonna talk about DC power sources. However, both AC and DC are equally able to cause you to kill yourself.

Electricity flows from the positive terminal to the ground. The other terminal (the non + one), often labelled the negative (-) terminal, can be used as the ground. For a battery, if the voltage rating of the battery is 5V, then the difference of voltage between the positive and negative terminals is 5V, so you can just use the negative terminal as ground. If you use another ground, you might end up with a different voltage supplied to your devices. I just thought of this so I've not tested it, and unfortunately I don't have a multimeter handy to test it. It's good to get a multimeter not just to learn but also to test your creations so that you reduce the likelihood that you kill yourself.

In an electrical circuit, if two points connected by a wire are not loaded, then the two points are at the same voltage level. It is only if there is a load will the voltage drop after the load. This is a pretty important concept worthy of some attention...

                                                          ... OK.

Just like water and traffic, electrical current flow is inversely proportional to the resistance of the path, if there are several different paths. That means the higher the resistance of the path, the less electrical current will flow through it.

Notice a couple of things from the above diagram. First, the current that flows from the 6V to the 0V, which is 9A, gets split up when it encounters the split in the circuit to the two resistors. Second, the amount that is split is inversely proportional to the resistance, as I have said above. Third, when the circuit joins back into one again, the split current gets added up again. Also notice that the voltage before and after each resistor stays the same even though the circuit has been branched.

For circuits that do not branch, the current that flows through is always the same through all the loads. However, the voltage difference across each load is proportional to the resistance of the load. Notice that if the circuit branches, as in the previous diagram, the current is split but the voltage across every branch is the same. This time, when there is no branch but multiple loads along the same line, current stays the same but voltages are split, or rather drained along the way. The current is determined using the overall resistance along the line which means just adding them up. You must be aware of all these so that you don't kill yourself.

Okay, I think armed with this basic knowledge, you can maybe get a few batteries, LEDs, wires, resistors, and most importantly a digital multimeter because that is the thing that you will learn about electronics from the most, both from a practical as well as theoretical point of view. Forget textbooks, get the stuff and try it out. Do this for your first project:

Ok why do you need the resistor there? If you don't have it, the voltage is gonna be a bit high resulting in too much current flowing through the LED which will cause the LED to go out in a blaze of glory. LEDs normally should take about 0.02A of current. I don't really know how to find out the resistance of an LED, I gather that it doesn't quite work that way. In any case you add more resistance to the circuit to lower the current flow. Suggest you get 3V worth of battery power with a 1kΩ (that's 1000Ω) resistor. Don't use power directly from the wall or you might just kill yourself.

Note: you're not gonna kill yourself with batteries, unless you, I dunno, cut open the battery and eat what's inside. How come normal AA/AAA type batteries don't kill people then? Well, do realise that if you join enough batteries together they would probably be able to kill a person. But if you're just handling like 2 or 3, then the voltage is not high enough to overcome the high resistance of human skin (about 500Ω for clean skin). Remember the relationship current = voltage/resistance? Yeah so 1.5 volts / 500 = 0.003A (remember 0.01A or (probably much) more can injure you and 0.1A or more can cause you to kill yourself).

After you're familiar with all these stuff, then perhaps we can talk about making a measurement system for reading real world signals like temperature or sound and converting them into digital signals so that a computer can understand them. Just don't end up killing yourself!

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Interesting Points of Interest - Don't get yourself killed!

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day

2010-09-19T23:14:00.006+08:00

Today, 19 September, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I know, a bit late to bring this up now, but at least you can be better prepared next year. Get ready your costumes, hire a crew, get a ship, and set sail for new adventures! And you gotta talk like a pirate too on that day.

As you've probably noticed, pirates say a lot of "Aaaarrrr" which can be an expression of anger, joy, frustration, disagreement, agreement, it can mean anything really and from the context of what you've said to the pirate that elicited the response you'll probably know what the "Aaaarrrr" is supposed to mean.

If a pirate calls you "matey", it's generally a good thing cos he's calling you friend. However, a pirate could call anyone "matey", even someone who's about to "take a long walk off the pirate's short plank".

"Ahoy" is definitely a friendly pirate greeting also used by sailors in general. No ambiguities here.

"Avast" means "stop" or "hold it". If a pirate shouts "Avast, ye mateys", he's probably telling everyone to stop what they're doing.

If a pirate calls you a "scurvy dog", he's generally addressing you as an inferior person. Scurvy was a common disease among sailors which resulted from a lack of vitamin C.

What else... what else... pirates drink grog which was some sort of alcoholic drink which pirates drank. "Pieces o' eight" were used as small change, which were 1/8 of a silver coin. A "doubloon" was a whole gold coin which was worth considerably more than a piece o' eight. Pirates did sword fighting using cutlasses which was a curved sword. A "Letter of Marque" was a document from the pirate's home government which showed that the pirating activities of the pirate were commissioned by the government. Normally a Letter of Marque would grant the holder license to attack and capture enemies of the country.

There's probably a lot more slang and stuff about pirating which I have left out. For further study, you can play the games Monkey Island 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Uncharted Waters 2: New Horizons, and those are the sources of my entire pirate education.

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Interesting Points of Interest - There is just something wrong with the sky and horizon of that picture...

Help Me

2010-09-17T09:30:00.009+08:00

Shit... study for (SF) QE, Half-Term Project 1 (due next week), Half-Term Project 2, Term Project 2, SF Exam 1, SF Exam 2, Research... Dear readers, I appeal to your unreasonable criticalness and absurd expectations to push me to complete the above tasks which I have exposed to the whole world so that the consequent mocking I would face from failing any one would be too terrible for me to bear.

And you know what I just realised? I'm not self-motivated to do all these stuff. I miss football and computer graphics and Blender and learning general stuff. After completing the Half-Term Project 1 by TODAY (nah... maybe by tomorrow), I might take a break and do some of the stuff I like to do. Yes, that's something to look forward to...

Half-Term Project 1 is about designing a Flexible Manufacturing System using sensors to make the whole thing work automatically.

In the past, people made stuff by hand. That was really slow and difficult and the rate of production was really low and the quality of products was bad, but that's a really long time ago.

Then came assembly line mass production. This probably started way before you think it started, like maybe 200+ BC when the Chinese Terracotta Army was made? You know the one, thousands of life-sized clay soldiers buried with The First Emperor of China, Qin Shihuang. This massive waste of resources and manpower was produced by different workshops, each in charge of making a different part of the clay soldier, which were later assembled. Each part had the name of the workshop inscribed on it so that if the part had any problems, well, I don't have to tell you what would happen to the workers of that workshop. Let's just say they were invited to join the Terracotta Army.

Then came Oldsmobile which created an assembly line in 1901 to produce cars more efficiently, increasing output from 425 in 1901 to 2500 in 1902. Then came Ford Motors in about 1913 which added conveyor belts to the assembly line idea. With this and other improvements, a new car could come off the line every three minutes, and everyone kind of thought that Ford invented the assembly line.

Well today, mass production is pretty well-established and all, but now we are seeing a change in demand patterns. It seems that with high rate of technology evolution and changing lifestyle trends and all that, mass production is not good enough; we need a rapidly changeable mass production system. This is where a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) comes in.

In an FMS, the part or product manufactured can be changed very quickly to respond to changes in demand, part design, etc etc. Some very important aspects of an FMS are automation, reliability, speed, and cost-effectiveness.

To achieve automation in an FMS, we have automated material-handling systems such as conveyor belts and automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), as well as CNC (computer numerical controlled) machines which automatically produce a part based on the computer 3D model design of the part. The CNC machines have automatic tool changers (ATC) to switch tools for the appropriate cutting job to produce the part.

Reliability of the FMS is improved by predicting and measuring tool wear so that worn-out tools can be replaced before catastrophic failure occurs.

Yes, welcome to the fascinating world of Manufacturing. And WE are the new generation who absorb knowledge from sources like Google and YouTube. Tell you a secret: school is obsolete.

CNC Lathe - the workpiece is rotated while the cutting tool is brought onto the workpiece - machining a chess piece

CNC Mill - the workpiece is held stationary while the rotating cutting tool is brought onto the workpiece - machining a face

Flexible Manufacturing System

Congratulations, you're 1/5 of the way towards a Mechanical Engineering degree.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Everyone should have an FMS at home to make whatever they need à la Star Trek.

Pandarama

2010-08-31T10:21:00.006+08:00

This has nothing - I repeat - NOTHING to do with the Machine Vision posts. But perhaps one day it will be?

Sweep Panorama is a well-known feature of Sony cameras, but mine is a CANON. Sweep Panorama allows you to shift the view of the camera from left to right as it takes pictures and automatically stitches them together to create a panoramic photo. Apparently the entire process takes like three seconds.

Without Sweep Panorama how do you do it? Some cameras have a panoramic mode that displays the side of the previous photo you took so you can manually align the camera before taking the photo. But humans suck.

So instead, you can use software to stitch and blend photos together to make panoramic photos. Yesterday I went and downloaded Hugin, an automatic photo-stitching software. But when I loaded up the photos that I took and clicked the "align" button there was an error. It turned out that the automatic control points creating programs were not included in the package. So to do the automatic control points creation part, I went and downloaded autopano and used that to get the control points and saved them as a PTO file, then opened the PTO file in Hugin to create the panorama.

Creating the panorama took 1.(dunno how many) hours. I started the process, waited quite a while, then went for a run. I came back and it was done. The result:

I like to crop stuff:

Not perfect. Maybe should try other automatic control point creation programs or something. But maybe with Sweep Panorama technology all this will become obsolete soon.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Can you guys don't put your blinker on if you're not coming into the lane. It causes me to slow down to let you in but you never come in. You know who you are, especially the vans and taxis but also normal cars.

Let There Be Equal Light

2010-08-30T01:24:00.017+08:00

We're on a roll, here's a continuation of the Machine Vision series of posts, the first of which is here.

Maybe I have not stated what Machine Vision is. Let me just check... yes I truly have not stated what Machine Vision is. Machine Vision is the vision of a machine. Like Arnold "it's not a toomah" Schwarzenneger in Terminator. Common hardware to achieve Machine Vision is a camera and digital signal processors which process digital signals. A computer is a kind of digital signal processors because it processes digital signals. How it processes digital signals depends on how you program the digital signal processors to process digital signals, for example adding two images together, or multiplying them etc etc etc, and many of these digital signal processes can be used to "shop" your photos.

Transformation Function
Of course, many common digital signal processes process a single image rather than splice multiple images together. A transformation function would be applied to the image to transform it and make it more workable for other processes or maybe the transformation achieves the end result that you want.

One example is the negative transformation, which transforms an image into a negative image. Stop me if I keep stating obvious stuff. For a grayscale image, if a pixel has 67% intensity, then its negative is 100% - 67% = 33% intensity. So, the negative transformation function takes each input pixel and subtracts it from 100% intensity to produce the output image. This makes black pixels become white pixels and white pixels become black pixels etc.

As usual, the above images are obtained using Matlab, with the transformation function implemented in Matlab. The code is really easy since we're still learning to stand. I don't even think I need to post the pseudo-code. The point is just the transformation function.

Histograms
The histogram of an image is a kind of graph showing the frequency of various intensities that occur in an image. This means it is a count of how many 0% pixels there are, how many 1% pixels there are, how many 2%, 3% etc etc etc etc.

The above isn't a very realistic example because the image itself isn't really realistic. A dark image will have more pixels at lower intensities, and a bright image will have more at the higher intensities.

The above is a histogram of the kiwi image, which is pretty dark. The histogram is obtained using a function I wrote in Matlab. The Matlab code I used:


for i = 1:width
   for j = 1:height
     hist(double(inImage(i,j)) + 1) = hist(double(inImage(i,j)) + 1) + 1;
   end
end

Time to tell you that in most digital representations, a grayscale pixel has 256 intensity values, that's 0 to 255.

Some explanation of the program code: "hist" is an array of 256 values. Each element of the array holds the number of pixels of the intensity value that is indicated by the element index. Since in Matlab, array elements start from 1 instead of 0, we have to add 1 to the intensity values that are used as array element indices. And from there, we keep adding 1 to the appropriate element as we read the intensity value of each pixel to accumulate the total number of pixels of each intensity. After all that, we can plot the histogram on a graph.

Contrast Stretching
As you can see from the kiwi histogram, the image is pretty dark. This image looks like it could benefit from some contrast stretching. Let's try to determine the transformation function to achieve contrast stretching.

The histogram shows that there are a lot of dark pixels, and from an intensity value of about 105 onwards, there are almost no pixels of higher intensity values. Based on the findings of the histogram, we'll try to stretch and spread the contrast such that there are more pixels of those higher intensity values.

The general form of a transformation function can be expressed as:

To get the values of "a" and "b", you gotta decide some boundary values for the equation. We noticed that at intensity 105 onwards, there were very few pixels with higher intensity values. So the aim is to get more pixels above 105. We could try transforming pixels with intensity 105 to intensity 256. Then, for the darker pixels, we don't wanna shift more pixels toward the dark end of the spectrum, so we can say that for pixel intensity 0, we just keep it at 0. So we can get two boundary values for the equation:

Now we got the values "a" and "b", we can use the transformation function to improve the kiwi image using this algorithm:


for i = 1:width
   for j = 1:height
      outImage(i,j) = (256/105)*inImage(i,j);
   end
end

And voila!

The improved kiwi.jpg histogram looks like this:

Perhaps graphically, the effectiveness of the transformation function is shown to be poor. The ideal histogram would have an equal spread of pixels over all intensities. Of course that is not possible to achieve for a normal photo, but generally speaking the intensities should be well spread. Visually though, the image was much improved. Don't know, maybe I can try to improve the transformation function in the next post and see if the image can be improved further. But for now, this will have to do.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Why does Gold 90 FM advertise their own radio station on their own radio station? Especially hate it when they play short samples of nice songs during the advertisement cos it puts me in the mood to listen to the whole thing. Please stop it you radio guys, I'm already listening to your station, no need to advertise. And can you guys let people with at least average level of general knowledge play the "8 questions" game?

This Looks Shopped

2010-08-26T16:30:00.015+08:00

Old news but I only came to know about it only now. In April of this year, a BP oil rig exploded killing people and releasing over 200 million gallons of oil into the ocean before it was stopped. But that's not the news I'm talking about. So, BP released some photos of the Oil Spill Crisis Command Center showing the crisis being handled, but they were slightly altered to make the photo look "better?" or "more impressive?". Nothing very sinister about it, not like they're trying to hide anything or fake anything... it's just... showbiz:

Then again... is the original shopped? I wouldn't know, as I can't tell from the pixels and I haven't seen quite many shops in my time.

Just a quick HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Melbro and Cowbro before moving on to...

Actually I just want to initiate a series of blog postings on Machine Vision because this is a really cool and fun way to prepare for exams (just ask Newman). And if other people reading this learn something from it, well then that is a great bonus.

To start off, here's some "Photoshop by Numbers" i.e. some basic image processing techniques using math to achieve them.

Background stuff:

Since images are just pixel intensity values, we can add/subtract/multiply/divide pixels with/from/with/by each other.

The above is what happens when you add the corresponding intensities of pixels from each picture together.

I did not use Photoshop or anything to get the resulting image. I used a program called Matlab to write the computer codes that reads each image in as a matrix representing the map of pixel values, then to add/subtract/multiply/divide the corresponding elements of each matrix to produce a result matrix which is then interpreted as a new image. Here is a pseudo-code for those that are interested:


for i = 1:600
 for j = 1:400
    final_image(i,j) = pushy(i,j) + porch(i,j)
 end
end

This is what happens if we subtract 'pushy.jpg' from 'porch.jpg':

Notice that where the white "pushy" word is supposed to be, there is now a blackish "pushy" word. And if we multiply them up:

By multiplying, since most pixels are above 0 in intensity and the intensity values are integers, almost everything gets brighter. But where there is absolute darkness (intensity = 0) no amount of light from the other image can add some white to that pixel, hence the black streak across the word "pushy". And if we divide 'pushy.jpg' by 'porch.jpg':

Dividing is kind of the opposite effect from multiplying, hence everything gets darker. But now, there is a white streak at the "pushy" word because a high intensity value divided by a low intensity value gives a high intensity value. The streak that was originally absolutely black in the previous image is the denominator while the "pushy" is absolutely white, so the streak preserves the white of the word.

Well of course these are just really basic techniques. Gotta learn to stand before you learn to walk right.

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Great free pizza we had yesterday at the lab. The delivery was 1 hour late because of non-existent rain.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Every video here is AWESOME.

Epic Post

2010-08-09T13:22:00.003+08:00

I guess, due to a rather long hiatus from work on the blog, an epic update is warranted. Here goes...

1) Bluetooth Mate burned out but worked again after removing the burned capacitor. Goodness knows what are the long term effects of using the Mate without that capacitor.

2) The really big thing that I thought I had completed a couple of months back came back to haunt me again, and again. It is really dragging down my planned research track but I guess it will help in the research overall.

3) A lot of little things that I thought I had completed came back to haunt me again, and again, and AGAIN. Good thing (or bad thing?) is that now I have an extra pair of hands to help in my research for one year. Bad thing (or good thing?) is that now I have an extra piece of really expensive and complicated hardware that I'm not supposed to have that may or may not help in the research.

4) The qualifying exam looms ahead. Therefore I'm gonna prepare for it in a similar way as I prepared for Neural Networks, only BAM! knock it up a notch with suM Fl@sh! Behold!

Right so that was just the intro. The whole thing is still a work in progress. There are of course many other topics besides the four main topics I listed at the end of the Fl@sh!. I guess those four main topics represent the fundamental cores of modern manufacturing. I dunno. What do I know? Anyway, by the time I'm done with the Fl@sh!, it should be a pretty epic thing. And all future generations need to do to prepare for the exam is to watch suM Fl@sh!

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Today is actually Singapore's National Day, no wonder nobody is going to work (except Kooty, cos she works for the Scots). I thought I better say something. Err... Thanks Singapore, for the low crime rate (doesn't mean NO crime!) and laksa.

Here's some epic laksa (not my photo).

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Interesting Points of Interest - Will never leave you hanging

Bluetooth, Mate

2010-07-28T17:32:00.012+08:00

Have you ever wondered what makes the electronic devices that have pervaded our lives so thoroughly tick? And I'm not even talking about the more modern ones like handphones and portable media players. What about even simple pocket calculators, digital clocks, tv remote, printer, microwave oven, VCR, air-con... there are between 10 to 100+ microcontrollers in a car, there are like 1000+ microcontrollers in a plane (every seat requires several microcontrollers for each passenger's entertainment system). Pretty much anything that has a digital display, you can be sure there is a microcontroller back there controlling everything.

I think you owe it to the microcontroller to be aware of it because then if one day you find yourself in a sticky situation, you can be like MacGuyver and rip a microcontroller out of a telephone and reprogram it to kill the enemies that are after you.

I first really learned about microcontrollers from a university undergraduate class. It was a class that made me never want to have anything to do with microcontrollers. After that, I saw friends struggling with microcontrollers for their Final Year Projects and that made me want to go for a lobotomy but the cost was too prohibitive.

I have finally reached a point in my life when dealing with microcontrollers is all but inevitable. So I've started playing with them and I must say I'm having a ball of a time.

A good place to start dabbling in electronics and microcontrollers is the Arduino range of boards. If you live in Singapore, you can get them online from sgBotic. If you live in any other part of the world, I'm sure you will have a large selection of online shops to get them from.

Do You Know Arduino?

This is the Arduino Duemilanove board, about $50 from sgBotic. Duemilanove is Italian for 2009 (due is 2, mila is 1000, and nove is 9). The name implies that it was designed in 2009. You can consider this naming convention for your children in future.

Those orange wires sticking out of it were stuck there by me. The large chip near the front, below the words, is the microcontroller itself. The board on which it is mounted provides power, either through USB or DC supply, to the microcontroller, and access to the inputs and outputs of the microcontroller.

Here is a system of LEDs that I built which are controlled by the Arduino microcontroller. Electronics is all about two states of electricity - ON or OFF. ON means there is voltage and current. By programming the microcontroller, you can control which pins of the microcontroller to set ON and OFF. The pins are connected to the input/output holes along the edge of the board so anything you connect there will receive the same ON/OFF signal.

For the programming side, the Arduino software from here is used to do the programming and uploading of the program. Arduino programs are called sketches and the programming language is pretty much just Java, but of course with a much smaller library of functions.

Oh but before that, the Arduino board connects to PC via USB, but it actually creates a virtual COM port (VCP), which means the USB will act like a COM port. A VCP driver is needed to do this and that can be obtained here.

Controlling the LEDs from the sketch is basically setting the various outputs ON and OFF and delays can be added between setting them ON and OFF to make the lights dance around.

Bluetooth, Mate

I also got a Bluetooth Mate from sgBotic that can be connected to a Duemilanove so that it can communicate with other devices using Bluetooth.

As you can see, when I say connect, I'm referring to quite a raw way of connecting. A breadboard (that white holey thing) is quite essential to avoid soldering and it's an easy way to try out circuits. The Bluetooth Mate is connected to the Duemilanove using this layout:

Notice that CTS is connected back to RTS on the same Bluetooth Mate board. Also the Rx is connected to Tx on the other board and Tx is connected to Rx on the other board.

Establishing a connection between the Mate and another Bluetooth device, though, may not be so straightforward. I tried using a PC to connect with the Mate. The process is basically:

1) Pair the Mate (which should show up as something like FireFly-A1B2) with the PC (which has Bluetooth) without using a pairing code, or use "1234" if Windows insists.
2) Use a program like putty to connect to the Mate-Arduino thing.

Of course, if you really want to test the thing, you gotta upload a suitable sketch to the Arduino. Something like this:


int count = 0;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(115200);
}

void loop() {
Serial.println(count);
count++;
delay(100);
}

The above is an example of a sketch. Every sketch has the setup() routine and loop() routine. The setup() is where you do the setup, and the loop() is where you make stuff happen repeatedly.

Notice that the serial port is opened with the number 115,200. That is the baud rate. The same baud rate must be applied to the serial port that the Mate is assigned to the PC.

When powering up the Duemilanove, a flashing red LED on the Mate indicates that there's power but it's not connected. When you run putty and with the correct settings and port selected, the red LED will go off and a green LED will light up indicating that the connection is established. If the above sketch has been uploaded to the Duemilanove, the putty window will show increasing numbers.

That is my gateway to a Bluetooth connection between the PC and a microcontroller, and to endless possibilities etc.

References

Arduino Tutorial: [link]
Connecting Bluetooth Mate to Arduino Pro Mini: [link]

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Interesting Points of Interest - etc etc etc

New Zealand... Ducks! And Other Animals

2010-07-18T20:34:00.008+08:00

These should be a couple of Paradise Ducks. The female is the one with the white head.

Here is a male mallard. I know because many years ago I used to play a duck hunting game for PC. You're given a list of types and genders of ducks and the number of them to hunt for that hunting session. If you shoot any other, you would be fined, so identifying ducks is really important. So some of that has been stuck in my head. One of them is male and female mallards.

The brown one behind the male mallards is a female mallard. I don't remember the black ones from the game but they look like New Zealand Scaups. Male and female Scaups look similar except maybe for the colour of the eyes. Male Scaups eyes are probably more strikingly yellow than the female, which is maybe more to the orange side.

Don't really wanna play Name That Bird anymore so.

A gull.

The Kea, as you might have already seen.

This is a fur seal.

These are Hector's Dolphins.

And these are Little Blue Penguins.

NZ seems like a pretty safe place to go in terms of dangerous animals, of which I think there are only two venomous spiders. By the way, venomous animals are animals that release toxins when they bite you or sting you, while poisonous animals are animals that release toxins when you bite them or touch them.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Stay tuned next week for more New Zealand... X!

A Good Week

2010-07-18T12:55:00.009+08:00

In a week that has seen my thumbdrive die, mobile device that I'm using for my research lose the ability to charge, Battlenet account get hacked because of a security flaw in A CERTAIN TOTALLY UNRELATED piece of software resulting in a loss of all my game characters' shit being stolen and causing me to worry about the security of all my iBanking accounts, email accounts, everything (tip: update all your adobe products to the latest version then change all your passwords), car CD player getting two CDs jammed inside because there was a CD inside when I inserted another one but it reported having NO CD inside when I pressed eject so now I can't insert another CD and it can only play the damn Andrea Bocelli CD that was inside originally, and my laptop battery die causing the whole laptop to just go off while I was doing my work even while the adapter was plugged in, I'd say I had a pretty good week, being payday week and all....

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Interesting Points of Interest - in before "That's why I don't play online games"

Don't Feed the Kea

2010-07-10T17:44:00.004+08:00

The Kea is a kind of parrot only found in the South Island of New Zealand, mostly in the forested areas. It has an insatiable curiosity and hunger for human food. Many posters warn against feeding the Kea because firstly human food is not suitable for them, secondly it makes them lose their natural feeding instincts, and thirdly it makes them become a nuisance to people. Nevertheless, you can always find them feasting on human food like buns, cakes, steak, pizza, sashimi, palak paneer, nasi goreng (which is quite easy to find in Christchurch), omelette du fromage etc. By the way, the afore-mentioned foodstuff are only examples of human food, not examples of human food which you can always find the Kea eating. Please read carefully next time before you raise any questions.

We had many exciting encounters with the Kea when we were in Arthur's Pass National Park. They seem harmless to people even though they tend to come very close and peck at cars even when people are in them. Up close you can see their rather interesting-looking plumage. It's mostly green with a tinge of orange and maybe a little blue as well.

Enough talk. I now present a short documentary about the Kea that I made using the photos and videos that we took in New Zealand (HD available):

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Interesting Points of Interest - Live Curious. Dare to Explore.

The World of New Zealand (WoNZ)

2010-07-04T20:54:00.005+08:00

As everyone knows, New Zealand was the filming site of the ~~Lord of the Rings~~ World of Warcraft.
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Oh and did you know that New Zealand was ALSO the filming site of the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Pretty cool huh!

This is where Frodo and his friends ran from the evil guys.

This is where Frodo and his friends ran from the evil guys.

This is where the evil guys almost caught up with Frodo and his friends but they managed to get away.

This is where Frodo and his friends ran from the evil guys.
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How to do fog in Photoshop CS4 (adapted from here)

1) Add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer on top of the picture layer and set saturation to 0 and lightness to 100.

2) Press "d".

3) Press "g" to go gradient mode and make sure linear gradient is selected (if that is the type of fog you want).

4) Drag the direction of fog (for example from top of the picture to bottom).

How to add some cloudy texture to the fog

1) Add a blank new layer between the Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer and the picture layer.

2) Select rectangular marquee and set feather to something like 30.

3) Select the area you where want the cloudy texture to be.

4) Go to Filter > Render > Clouds and apply it to the blank layer.

5) Right-click the blank layer and go to Blending Options.

6) Alt-drag the This Layer line under Blend If: Gray to 255. Alt-dragging splits the little triangle at 0 so that half is at 0, and the other half you drag to 255.

Further realism to fog/mist

1) Erase with a circular eraser with low hardness the fog/mist from foreground objects.

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Interesting Points of Interest - Let us be your living room tour guides!

You Served Us Well

2010-07-04T01:35:00.014+08:00

This is a tribute to the greatest car in the world. It served us well in NZ, kept us warm, kept us safe, kept all our barang-barang, kept us moving, and without having a sticky accelerator pedal. Most importantly, it looks daaaamn good in our pictures. (Can anyone help us photoshop the Toyota logo out?)

We got snowed-in at our hotel in Arthur's Pass. Well almost. We were not gonna let a little snow get in the way of carrying on with our holiday. We got down on our hands and knees to feel the snow with our hands because it was our first time experiencing real thick snow. Then we swept a path with our boots for the car to go. Slowly, inch by inch, we swept as the car skidded and swerved along. And for the last few metres, we had the help of Daniel (? not sure if that's his name), the waiter at the hotel, who pushed the car with all his might until it got onto the clear highway. And from there we bade our goodbyes and went on our way.

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Interesting Points of Interest - By the way, to that couple who took a picture of us clearing the snow with our feet and laughing at us for getting snowed-in, we wish you all the best :)

Haich Dee Arr

2010-07-01T20:39:00.006+08:00

I've been aware of HDR for the longest time but never really bothered to find out how to do it. Now I have, AFTER coming back from New Zealand. To apply the effect, you gotta take three pictures of different exposure settings (use Auto Exposure Bracketing or AEB) or at least take a picture in RAW format. I went to NZ and took only single JPGs. Well I'm sure there are methods to get the effect using only single JPGs but thus far I'm not aware of any.

This is a picture I took just now, and I used Photomatix Pro (trial version) to achieve the HDR effect.

One of the originals:

Still getting to know the various settings on the software. Not very impressed with my first attempt at HDR. I've seen much nicer HDR stuff. Personally I would only apply this effect to a few photos for special purposes, or maybe apply it with very mild settings to improve the appearance of dark images.

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Interesting Points of Interest - High dynamic range...

E noho rā New Zealand

2010-06-29T20:41:00.006+08:00

I'm back, physically. Now there is the business of telling you about the trip and sharing the photos. Where to begin?

I have over 2000 photos but of course, I'm never gonna upload them all. During the long winter nights in NZ I kept thinking how to organize and arrange and present the photos. I think I've come upon a creative solution. I won't go day by day. Slowly, from time to time, starting from now, I shall upload some here. What better way to begin than the most random of random photos from NZ (click on the YouTube logo and go watch it in Full HD!):

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Interesting Points of Interest - Check out the vuvuzela button on the YouTube videos, for a limited time only I presume. I hate those things!!

New Zealand... Rocks!!!

2010-06-15T23:17:00.015+08:00

It's been 12 days since the last post. I'm sure you all know by now that if I stop posting for some time it means I've really been busy. Now I'm gonna be really free for the next couple of weeks, BUT I won't have much time to blog still!!

Why not you ask? Well, all in due time my friend, or as they say in France, tout en temps voulu.

The past one month has been hectic. First I had to rush out something for something (it's classified). Then straight after I completed that I got sick from eating ice-cream and then sleeping in air-con without using a blanket. After 1 week of working through the illness, my head kept feeling really stuffed with air, like it was bursting, especially towards the late afternoon, and this gave me headaches. This went on for about a week and I had to work through the discomfort and headaches until I discovered it was because my ears were clogged. I unclogged them but the very next day out of NOWHERE I developed a painful stiff neck and the pain was giving me headaches and I had to work through the pain and headaches. The pain went away after a few days and the next day, it's today. And tomorrow... Alas, you are not ready for it yet.

I just want to say for myself to hear (read) that I have not wasted the past 1 month of my life. What I mean is that all the work that I did in the past 1 month is not just purely for work. I mean that yes even though the work is for a PhD degree in the end, it's more than that. It's work that will be useful even if I fail to get the degree in the end. I don't disappoint easy because I don't expect too much.

Among other things, I have learned a lot the past few months, and especially in the last few weeks. Firstly, I've become quite competent in Android programming (Android phones, you know? They're all the rage now). Then in the past month, I've learned and also becomee competent in varying degrees in ActionScript 3, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS. I'm no expert yet but at least I'm getting somewhere.

I fully intend to post tutorials on those topics here, not so much for the benefit of readers but more for myself to reinforce my knowledge and to remember it better. This works, let me tell you. Remember I tried blogging as a way to study for exams. I only had one exam this semester and that's the neural networks one. Remember I blogged about Newman and the Fantastic Four and all that? Remember? Well, lets just say that it worked out really really PLUS really well. I can't post the tutorials now cos tomorrow I'm... ah ah ah I almost gave the game away. If, I mean WHEN I post those tutorials, I highly recommend you read them cos they gonna be cool!!

So here I am, about to leave my work behind and not care about it for the next two weeks. I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea yet but I feel I've completed it up to a point where it sets up nicely for me to come back after two weeks and focus on a different aspect of the work from now on. Typing that out here makes me feel more comfortable with the idea of dropping work for two weeks. Let me try it again. I feel I've completed it up to a point where it sets up nicely for me to come back after two weeks and focus on a different aspect of the work from now on. Ok now I'm entirely comfortable with the idea of dropping work for two weeks. WHY TRAVEL THE WORLD WHEN YOU CAN VISIT NEWTOWN!!!

I am going to New Zealand tomorrow.

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Interesting Points of Interest - "New Zealand" posters courtesy of the New Zealand Consulate of New York City. Thanks Murray, and hope it all works out with you and the band!