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[ February 2007 ] | |
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TCHS 4O 2000 [4o's nonsense] alvinny [2] - csq - edchong jenming - joseph - law meepok - mingqi - pea pengkian [2] - qwergopot - woof xinghao - zhengyu HCJC 01S60 [understated sixzero] andy - edwin - jack jiaqi - peter - rex serena SAF 21SA khenghui - jiaming - jinrui [2] ritchie - vicknesh - zhenhao Others Lwei [2] - shaowei - website links - Alien Loves Predator BloggerSG Cute Overload! Cyanide and Happiness Daily Bunny Hamleto Hattrick Magic: The Gathering The Onion The Order of the Stick Perry Bible Fellowship PvP Online Soccernet Sluggy Freelance The Students' Sketchpad Talk Rock Talking Cock.com Tom the Dancing Bug Wikipedia Wulffmorgenthaler       |
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bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ today's page views: 201 (28 mobile) all-time page views: 3741139 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1257 page created Wed Mar 11, 2026 06:44:17 |
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- tagcloud - academics [70] art [8] changelog [49] current events [36] cute stuff [12] gaming [11] music [8] outings [16] philosophy [10] poetry [4] programming [15] rants [5] reviews [8] sport [37] travel [19] work [3] miscellaneous [75] |
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- category tags - academics art changelog current events cute stuff gaming miscellaneous music outings philosophy poetry programming rants reviews sport travel work tags in total: 386 |
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- + epl tales -  $100 Challenge Week 24 - $1823.65/$2300 so far. $50 on Man Utd (-1.5) vs Fulham (at 2.20) - About right $20 on Boro to draw Reading (3.15) $20 on Everton to beat Watford (2.20) $10 on Charlton to beat West Ham (2.20) And a wabbit joke from The New Paper: A little girl walks into a pet shop and asks with the sweetest little lisp, "Do you have widdle wabbits?" The shopkeeper's heart melts. He gets down on his knees, so that he's on her level, and asks, "Do you want a widdle white wabbit or a thoft and fuwwy bwack wabbit, or maybe one like that cute widdle bwown wabbit over there?" She blushes, puts her hands on her knees, leans forward, and says in a quiet voice, "I don't fink my pet python weally gives a thit."
- programming - This couldn't wait for the next regular posting: Microsoft Phishing Filter catches their own website. 
Indeed suspicious. (Click to enlarge)
- changelog - changelog v1.06 --------------- * bert's blog now comes in eleven extra languages! Click display preferences to select your preferred lingo. Translation service kindly provided by Altavista Babelfish. * Snap.com preview further customized. * Longstanding February misspelling as Feburary fixed. Reading one's blog entries in Chinese puts a whole new perspective on things, since I almost never write in my mother tongue. For instance, here's the post before this after the Babelfish is done with it: "它是不典型地久时光因为 前更新了 。十天 什么疏忽 补偿有些它 这一个丰收岗位 以前那 一个词从管理" More! More! "的确 我们是所有正义人 在末端 如果您刺我们 我们不流血吗 如果您戳我们 我们不吱吱叫吗" No match for an old friend's exclusively Chinese blog recently added to the links section, though :) Objective: Finish lab assignments and other tutorials in advance during this break. CHIONG AH!!! Oh, and a little something on today morning's hardfought 0-1 away win at Lille OSC (did a doubletake when I first saw their club crest, it looked like LOSE to me): 
Oui, oui
- outings - Its been an uncharacteristically long time since I last updated the ol' blog. Ten days! What negligence! To make up for it somewhat, here's a bumper post; Before that, a word from the administration: 
He's on fire! Let's see what I've missed out on saying. Last Sunday, the usual rare basketball cum street soccer. Had a genuine (right) leg cramp while jumping for a header, which took me quite a while to recover from even with some helpful stretching by the 4O guys. Now if I ever need to dive, I know what to do :P Reminded me of the last time in Primary Six when I had both legs cramping up one after the other in probably my first organized competitive match. Monday saw a lunch meetup with a car-ing twc. Free riding! Free Milo at the Central Plaza too before that, and we loaded up on more than half a dozen cups each... which led me to think about all the times I plonked down $1.10 (yes, overpriced) for a 300+ml can. My personal subsidy, I guess. Thursday's attempt to break the record for number of plates of baked rice requested in a single order fell through as too many people didn't make it. Sad. Fast forward to Friday... stayed home to code the A.I. Breakthrough miniproject. Yes, yes, it was the submission deadline (2359 hours, as in the Army), and by 5 p.m. me and zy were still sweating over why our alphabeta pruning implementation wasn't working. It was supposedly a straightforward understand-and-transfer thing. And the literally thousands of nodes churned out by the algorithm weren't helping. After tweaking lots of stuff to no avail, I changed the return value of the recursion function to MAX_VALUE-1 instead of MAX_VALUE, more out of desperation than anything. And it just worked. I guess if you asked us we may have had some vague intuition of why it did, but really it reeked slightly of voodoo programming. Still, just hours before one loses 15% of the entire module's marks, capable witch doctors are welcome. May upload a Perl port of our code when the fancy strikes hard enough. Back to Bedok for my annual visit to my paternal grandparents' place. Amusing start to the day, when the (probably) rubber soles of my almost unused pair of leather shoes began to crack apart. Barely made it upstairs before a large chunk just peeled off. Here's to posterity: 
Out with the old... Salvaged the shoelaces only. Seems like not only women have to worry about their heels coming off. The little white doggie belonging to one of my relatives was back again, and this time it elected to lick my toe instead of my hand. Must remember to take a photo of it next year. Unfortunately, its year's over. Some interesting sights over at the Eastern end of Singapore included some guy selling curry puffs and burgers from a cardboard box at the void deck, a mobile ice-cream vendor in the neighbourhood (why don't I see any in Jurong?), and a metal fork inexplicably plunged into the bark of a tree at the carpark. Hopefully no one got too hungry. Oh, and a single digit on a yellow licence plate vibrating when the vehicle it belonged to was in neutral. Enjoyed three FA Cup matches in a row while going through my sister's Newsweek subscriptions and tearing up at the smoke pouring into the flat from outside. And Man Utd only drew while Chelski thrashed Norwich, so it wasn't that enjoyable anyway. Thankfully I suspended the $100 Challenge for the week. Watched Just Follow Law (no, not you, law) with my family on the first day of CNY. What to say about it? After it ended, my mum commented that it "didn't have a coherent theme", and indeed some parts seemed contrived - but hey, it's not easy for Jack Neo to churn out a holiday movie every year. Actually, we wanted to watch Norbit or Epic Movie, but my brother wasn't sixteen yet. He's 5cm taller and around 10kg heavier than me, though. Ah, and we were rather tickled by the sight of three guys posing for photos at the field outside JEC. They even used a parked motorcycle (which didn't look as if it belonged to them) as a prop, with one of them straddling it in a macho manner. Guess most bikes don't have alarms. Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow. A few nice jibes in the movie - at one point, Gurmit Singh's character's young daughter shows him an exam paper for which she got 66.6 marks, to which he replies, "Good for the first time.". Ring a bell? In another scene, an old woman is recorded on CCTV as she asks for a form to register for a computer literacy course. Ding dong? Later, it is commented that Singaporeans "have a short memory, and if the media do not mention something, they soon forget all about it." Zing! Towards the end, an exposé on civil servants using their wives' names to register companies. Now that one I haven't heard of, but if true the spirit of law loses out to its letter again. It's John Stuart Mill all over again, the conflict between "...(allowing) individuals to control their own destiny by navigating through a sea of ideas, instead of being forced to travel down a narrow river of thought, as mandated by a single authority." (as I used to conclude my essay last semester). Between a narrowly focused but generally reliable (controlled) press, and a much more far-ranging but less accountable Internet, which should be preferred? More on this soon... A tiny tidbit from the papers - some people in China are complaining that they are afraid of turning down "Want Want" biscuits since its advertising implies that they bring fortune. Chalk one up for susceptibility. Finally, here's a video of my 2nd and 3rd labs for CS5243. Some revision on generating and texture mapping terrains, then an exercise on including MD2 (Quake 2 model format) files. With a few more models and visual effects, a networking component and a storyline, we have the next World of Warcraft. Yeah right. The most important part of the labs was probably view frustum culling, i.e. not passing to the GPU any object which will not be rendered in the final scene (yes, by default one creates all those objects and then dumps them wholesale to the poor graphics card to make sense of them). This is demonstrated with the AABBs, which are green when the object remains in view, and becomes red when it goes out of view. Nothing too hard with that, it was the dynamic 3D plane checking that took the cake.
$50 on Man Utd (-2.5) vs Charlton (at 2.10) - And that's to win by three clear goals $20 on Newcastle to draw Liverpool (3.20) - Like "small club" Everton? $10 on Chelski to draw Middlesborough (5.50) - Last five for Boro: D-D-W-W-W. $20 on Middlesborough (+1.5) vs Chelski (1.87)
- academics - When Teacher of Great Learning funny, life in Fine City of Singapore more bearble. Take certain Honoured Professor of Top Twenty University in Whole Wide World who invite Representative scholar of Glorious Nation of Kazakh Borat Sagdiyev himself to remonstrate dense theory of money selling. In importance above man, horse and dog. Together. Borat begin by feel University need desperately Association before its name, for great acronym marketability in Kazakh. But hosts respectfully decline. But this not here or there. So Borat shrugh and begin lecture series "Borat Economics Explain". And yes, He Like You! 
"Jagshemash, Today Borat Explain the "Real Exchange Rate". When I in khazakstan, I drink one glass Fermented Mare Milk every day. It cost 10 uzgert. When I go learning in America, glass of fermented mare milk very expense, cost $8. In airport, it cost 25 uzgert to buy one dollar. So, Professor Huw1 tell me this is nominate rate exchain e' = 25. 1 he very good friend, my sister like him much" Extracted stopping here since intellectual law say no more than ten something per cent of paper can reproduce. Though this free, no cent, and many things make romance reproduce, but not paper, cane here mighty that not Supreme Warlord Premier William Clinton save. So if want to learning about exchain rat, Punching Power Party and how to more compet, taking levelthree Macrowecon module very nice. Wa-wa-wee-wa!
- + epl tales - As a fellow student in the Econs lecture enthused, this was the "perfect football weekend" :) It began for me with a 3-1 victory in Hattrick, then the Singapore aggregate win (see previous post), and finally Man Utd hiding Spurs 0-4 at White Hart Lane. And I even finished inking all my lecture notes. 
Sorry about the sources, didn't keep track
- sport - Brilliant late Khairul Amri strike earns Singapore a 1-1 draw in the Rajamangala Stadium, and with it a 3-2 aggregate win to lift the ASEAN Football Championship. To tie Thailand as joint-top winners with three apiece. Nice to see the heroes crying in happiness. Cynical play? Well... which team never does it? And Chelski just had to win by the one goal against a bottom-three club. One more reason to strongly dislike them. $20 on Man Utd to beat Tottenham (at 1.70) - Not going to make a lot of difference.
200 gold! Oops, wrong context. 
FB! IN YOUR FACE LOLOLLLL Thanks to the very persuasive twc who listed out several great reasons to give, not to mention berating those not interested in doing so as a [sic] "piece of guniang shit", I made a detour to MPSH 4 yesterday. Was bolstered by edchong confirming that there was free Milo when he went on Thursday. There was no queuing or anything, we just sat around waiting for our turn to register, which was made tricky since the later volunteers could be seated at the front and vice versa. Ended up having to guess when everyone who arrived before me had their turn. Cursory checkup by a doctor, then a screening of blood density by dropping a single drop into some bluish liquid to see whether it sank or floated. Passed. The actual procedure itself was pretty painless - Extend arm onto a specialised metal armrest, allow the experienced nurse to locate a vein just below the elbow joint (after the rubbing alcohol or whatever), poke, insert. Was handed a stress ball and told to squeeze it every five seconds. Not as freaked out as I might have expected at seeing my own blood flow out for collection - it's for a good cause, after all. When it was over and I saw the nurse walking away with the bulging packet (nearly half a litre I suppose), I was all "Wow, that's only like ten percent of my blood!" Oh, and I ended up a pound lighter, so for the weight-conscious, you can drop a pound, guaranteed, while doing a good deed at the same time. Indeed, we are all just humans, at the end; If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poke us, do we not squeak? 
Beware Of Battle Bunny (edited from some signature on the DotA Allstars Forums) Maybe that's going a bit far, but bunnies are far from defenceless - they beat up snakes (not on a plane though) for fun. Don't see many guard dogs doing that. *Adds to list of personal life goals Item #643: Train squad of elite ninja bunnies* And I'll need to find a towel to throw in. $1789.65/$2100 about two-thirds of the way through. I can think of some mitigating factors off the top of my head, but I'll save it for the May post-mortem. Good studies have to run their course. $50 on Chelski (-1.5) vs Charlton (2.00) - Addicks, make my day $20 on Bolton to beat Watford (at 2.00) $10 on Blackburn to beat Sheff Utd (at 1.62) $20 reserved for Man Utd tomorrow.
- current events - Fifteen storeys up in the air, it's seriously cold. How much of my life have I spent fifty metres above ground level? So strange, when I think about it - of all that could have been, this is. When one considers all that exists in an instant of time, it is easy to imagine that this is about as close to almost never as can be, the equivalent of being at the exact point a dart hits when thrown at a dartboard with an essentially infinite number of points within. 
From MTG:Gatherer Don't you sometimes think it absolutely wonderful? Trivia: Magic: The Gathering has a cycle of Winds in the Prophecy set: "The first wind of ascension is Forger, burning away impurity." Searing Wind "The second wind of ascension is Reaver, slaying the unworthy." Plague Wind "The third wind of ascension is Eliminator, clearing Keld's path to victory." Denying Wind "The fourth wind of ascension is Anointer, deifying the worthy." Blessed Wind "The fifth wind of ascension is Exalter, fulfilling Keld's destiny." Vitalizing Wind Winds were aplenty at the National Stadium's swansong too, but this time it was the winds of controversy. Dad gamely picked me up after my evening lecture had concluded, and we got there in time for the second half with six gallery tickets unused (too bad about that, we did make an attempt to give them away but it was probably too late). I confess I was pleasantly surprised to see the scoreboard read Singapore 1 Thailand 0, but the Thais quickly pulled level after no foul was given for overrunning a Singapore player. The fans kept their colour however (ironically the Thais were the ones playing in red, so any unaware neutrals might have concluded that they were the home side), especially one wit seated behind me who uttered such comments as "You want to go Bangkok at 1-1 issit? Die, lah!" After a few decisions didn't go the Lions' way, cries of "Busoh!" (Smelly?) and "Referee kayu" began to ring out. Then came The Incident. I was situated at the other end of the stadium, but a player going down in the box is always eyecatching. Nothing given, I sat down again, then - penalty! That cheered up the fans quite a bit, but then it soon became clear that the Thais had no intention of letting the penalty be taken. While there was a nice 14 minute 19 second debate at the Thai bench, the Singaporean players passed the time trading passes on the pitch, and the spectators with several consecutive Kallang Waves. Understandably, we were pretty pissed at the delay. What was the point? They could just walk off immediately if that was their intention, and save us all the wait, or continue if they were not going to boycott anyway. Of course, FIFA would not take kindly to such a flagrant breach of conduct and some ban would have resulted if they had abandoned the match, and the Thai side probably knew that, along with the fifteen minute limit. Thus the well-timed delay. Perhaps they were trying to unsettle the eventual penalty taker, but if that was so it didn't work. Mustafic Fahrudin, the Serbian-born Singaporean, rifled a perfect shot into the top right corner. In fact, I suspect that well-hit penalties to the top corners are nigh impossible to save even if the keeper knows where it is going, but it takes quite some accuracy and guts. And so we won. For now. Until Sunday. I have to say though that I feel divided about foreign talent in sport, though. On one hand, the Lions' FT contigent - off the top of my head I can remember Mustafic, Bennett, Shi Jiayi, Itimi Dickson and Precious - performed very well, and looked proud to wear the jersey. On the other hand, on the day of the match, a former Lion quietly left Singapore, just like that, perhaps never to return. His name was Egmar Goncalves, he hailed from Brazil, and he took up citizenship in 2002 to play for the national side. I cannot fault him in wanting to return to his motherland, where his family resides. But to say that we nutured his talent when he was already 31 years old in 2002 is more than a little odd. I always thought that the idea was to adopt and nurture undeveloped raw diamonds, not to jump the whole process by simply offering national colours to S-League stars. Then again, maybe I am just naive. This is an age where Chinese paddlers represent European countries, and African marathoners fly the banners of Gulf states. This leads me to recall a passage from Bartholomew's biography of the Sultan of Brunei, which describes the problems of His Majesty hiring top Argentinean polo players to secure wins against his Malaysian counterparts. "The Sultan of Brunei won some games against one of the Malaysian Sultans with the aid of such sporting prima donnas. But then the Malaysians too started hiring the 'assassins' and were able to hold their own again. One may wonder what was the point of it all." Judging from how some Thais were burning our DPM's effigy even before this (our PM got it last year), I guess we won't exactly be persona gratis in the Land of Smiles for the near future; Indonesia's stopping sand sales, Malaysia's spinning flood tales (their own exporting of sand to us was banned in 1997). Have we become the USA of SEA, or am I just overreacting? Well, trust Dr. M to throw in a free kick, even if he no longer represents the official Malaysian position. "You'll get nowhere with them either being nice or being tough, they only think of themselves." What's this, good cop-bad cop? Oh, and he said "(Thaksin's) outspokenness against Western countries has put him in a bad light with the foreign press." That's rich. To be fair, many politicians are afflicted with Pot-Kettle-Black Syndrome (Note: I Drew This is an unashamedly liberal cartoon). But back to Singapore not winning the Most Popular Nation Award. There's the old baggage of our recognition of Israel and perceived alignment with the USA, not too welcome in these parts - but size has quite a bit to do with it too. A target is always more tempting when it's smaller, even Taiwan added peesai to the growing lexicon of derogatory references. But justice at international level has always been a matter of convenience. If Iraq didn't have oil (like a certain North Korea), would a certain superpower have been so eager to institute regime change? And it turns out that Iraq never had any Weapons of Mass Destruction, the original mandate for the war. But North Korea proudly brandishes WMDs! Well, here's news - Bush on North Korea: "We Must Invade Iraq". What about the other reasons? 1. Links to al-Qaeda: Also not proven. Secular tyranny and religious fanaticism don't make good bedfellows. And guess what, when foreign troops start invading on a somewhat flimsy basis, it's likely that young men search for an answer, and al-Qaeda and other similar groups are in a good position to provide them. 2. Removing an oppressive dictator from power: Saddam's a special one, I'll have to say that. Quote the above news article from The Onion: "Kim Jong Il, you have withdrawn from international nuclear treaties and cruelly starved your own people," Bush said. "The world at large will not let your evil deeds go unchallenged. Someone, somewhere will hold you accountable, sooner or later. I do not know who this person is, but somebody will. North Korea has been pouring its limited resources into development of a huge military force at the expense of its own people's well-being," Bush continued. "Somebody should take decisive action against this, just as the U.S. did in stopping the Taliban and will soon do in ousting Saddam Hussein." One wonders what the African variety needs to do to attract the U.S.'s attention. 3. Bringing of democracy to Iraq: Not much democracy now, and if the U.S. cuts and runs, there might be not much Iraq left either. One of the few things that can be said about Bush is that he's taking some responsibility here, though he's not the one paying for it. The Beckham's Gillette specialization of Occam's Razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem - entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity) which I subscribe to says that if you have more than one good reason to do something, there is no need to worry overmuch about which of those reasons is the best. Unfortunately, good reasons are a scarce commodity here. But guess what? Few care, which is understandable considering the brutality of the unlovely Mr. Saddam; But I cannot just help but think that had Iraq been poorer in resources, he might have escaped the noose. 
Don't think of it too much (From China Daily) I'll leave the connection to game theory till tomorrow. Or soon.
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