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[ April 2010 ] | |
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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: 276 (21 mobile) all-time page views: 3400995 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1228 page created Sun Jul 13, 2025 13:30:56 |
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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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- as seen on Fark. Mr. Ham disapproves.  Top Row: Old Philips 190B, depressed button circled Bottom Row: Promo images of the Samsung SyncMaster B2330 Well, this week was mostly spent rushing the project for the speech processing module (worth 50% of the total score), and I daresay I did a decent job in just four days - having a deadline concentrates the mind wonderfully. Unfortunately, this probably won't help me break my habit of procrastination. Other key observations: Notepad++ has the word wrap feature, there are situations where writing a script and manually editing data takes about the same time (in the best traditions of Buridan's ass), the Internet has better recipes sometimes, and a large portion of reports is regurgitation of background knowledge, which can't be helped. In the process, my three-and-a-half year old Philips 190B 19-inch monitor began operating its on-screen display buttons by itself again as I applied the finishing touches to my project report, which if not debilitating, was certainly very annoying. If I weren't receiving a stipend, I might have sucked it up and attempted to beat some sense into it, which works more often than it should on recalcitrant electronics (one just has to know where to pummel them), but as things are now, I figured that a new monitor would be a good investment. Hey, it's a work-related expense. My uncle ended up picking up the 23-inch Samsung SyncMaster B2330 from IMM at S$298, less than half the S$650 I (actually, my dad) spent for the Philips back in 2006. Due to its width, I thought that its screen was shorter than the old monitor on first sight, but some measuring tape affirmed that both were equally tall - but the new monitor is about 14cm longer, which is quite a lot. Kind of miss the adjustable stand that the Philips had (see top right of image), however. Some initial teething troubles with the touch-sensitive buttons aside, the display of the Samsung just seemed a little blurry at a resolution of 1280 x 768, which was the widescreen equivalent of my usual 1024 x 768. After some experimentation, no less fervent that those connected to my module project, I was resigned to the fact that LCD screens simply look by far the greatest at their native resolution - which in the case of the Samsung, is a whopping 1920 x 1080. Sure, the text may be tiny, but so what if it's tack sharp? Come to think of it, as my monitors have grown in size from fifteen to seventeen to nineteen and now twenty-three inches, my display resolution has likewise moved from good old 640 x 480 to 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768 and now to 1900 x 1028, with the effect that the larger my display size got, the smaller the average text size (in absolute terms) became. If this continues, one day I'll be reading a three-foot screen with a magnifying glass. Still, I'll probably get used to it in short order. Of course, one can zoom in on web browsers and most applications, and resize windows quickly with the Win+Arrow keyboard shortcut, but it just seems strange when 100% doesn't work as the default. At least I won't be running out of taskbar space. As though it thought that it was an opportune time to retire too, the A4Tech X7 mouse that I got about the same time as the old monitor, started playing up too. With click-and-drag actions becoming double-clicks, and the mouse wheel skipping gears, it was indeed time for it to go. Out came the Logitech wireless mouse that came as a set with my latest keyboard (kept under wraps as the X7 just felt right)... only for me to discover that it emits an annoying squeak with each left-click. Mr. Ham came out to persuade his relative to keep the noise levels down, but to no effect. Seems like a new mouse will be on my shopping list after the exams. World Cup update - receiving free-to-air signals from Malaysia and Indonesia by antenna is perfectly legal, says the Straits Times - but IPTV is not. Last week was a dream week for United, as they beat City with a last-gasp Scholes goal, and Spurs, yes Spurs, took both Arsenal and Chelsea down. What were the chances of that? Three rounds of matches to go... $50 on Manchester United to draw Tottenham (at 4.00) - not that unlikely, sadly $50 on Sunderland to beat Hull City (2.98)
- academics - Practical revision on databases these few days, dabbling in MySQL. After a brief try at nested SELECTs caused the server to hang softly, I recalled that one usually joins tables by TABLE1.Column=TABLE2.Column. Oops. That, and some issues with accidentally using the MySQL keyword ORDER as a column name, and not setting aliases for generated tables where nested SELECTs are indeed appropriate, I realised that I could, in practice, return tables satisfying just about any criteria I thought of, without further post-processing in Perl; this however required a change in mindset, and might produce quite lengthy SQL queries. I also rediscovered how much work can get done, if one just does it. Prior art, I know, but one which I need to rediscover every so often.  Shinier than my home system This included setting up my lab space yesterday. I was never too enthusiastic about that, since I've done all my research from home, but I had to admit that the PC system I got assigned was pretty neat. After wheeling the box and peripherals into the lab, and plugging in the wires, I got my freeware essentials onto it. Too bad about the paltry sub-300GB of hard disk space. Jumping on to the hamster front, Microsoft Excel 2007 has certainly spruced up its chart eye-candy score:  (Data source: Uncle [mostly]) $2549.50/$2650 after the Hammers nailed the Black Cats. This week: $25 on Blackburn to draw Everton (at 3.25) $25 on Tottenham to draw Chelsea (3.20)
was to award six to one side and half a dozen to the other..." - Patrick Barclay, Chief Football Commentator of The Times  It must be quantum (Source: Redcafe.net) More recycled stuff, this time cribbed from RedCafe. As highlighted by this particularly egregious instance, one wonders if reporters actually bother to watch - or research - the matches for which they dash off hundreds of words. Not that one can complain too much about the result, given that the referee somehow missed sending Neville off and giving a penalty for what could be described at best as "a good old-fashioned shoulder charge" on Anelka, that came nowhere near to taking the ball. The match officials were probably not biased - just very poor all around.  Measures of relative importance Purchased a 1.5TB Samsung Spinpoint internal hard drive from Sim Lim Square (at S$148*/**), after getting hundreds of gigabytes of data - some areas of CS require but pen and paper, just not mine. Hope it gets along well with the other Samsung and two Seagates (each a piffy 150-odd GB; how did I ever survive back then?). *Note 1: according to edchong and twm, prices are somehow rather lower in the States. And I thought we were a manufacturing mecca... **Note 2: This works out to less than US$0.00007 per megabyte; Twenty years ago, memory cost about US$10 per megabyte (not even one good photo nowadays), thirty years ago, some US$200, and US$10000 back in 1956. As a side bonus, I found out that an *.inf file was messing with the icon and label of one of my drives, and finally got around to defragmenting my drives/backing up critical data - a hard disk failure is the easiest way not to graduate, after all. More: Bolo Santosi appears to have boosted the blog readership tremendously in the short term, breaching the (admittedly small potatoes) mark of 400 pageviews/day for the first time in aeons. You go, gahrl! By the way, The New Paper revealed that the voice actress for Santosi is actually a Brit, Liz Sutherland - but she does have a Teochew Singaporean mother, and resided here until she was seventeen. Just Cause 2 also supposedly has Hokkien vulgarities; score two for realism. $2549.50/$2600 - almost caught up. This week's selection: $50 on Sunderland to beat West Ham (at 3.15)
- gaming - Move over, Inigo Montana! (Source: mrbrown.com) Seeing as her headquarters are at Tanah Raya (which seems to be loosely translatable from Malay as "Election Land", and which may or may not be near Tanah Merah), she's wearing a baju kebaya, and that the game actually takes place in South-east Asia, I doubt that this is completely a coincidence (further note: Developer Eidos Interactive has an office in Singapore). Who knows, this might spur a flowering of Singaporean culture; there's no reason why we can't replicate what the Koreans, Taiwanese and Hong Kongers did with their dramas and movies, and Ms Santosi may just be the ambassador we need. I can already imagine the future for Singaporeans:
One can only hope. I should be stuck doing this (see comic below), and mugging for the quals, for the rest of the month, so don't expect much original content, if any.  (Source: xkcd.com) Slowly catching up, on $2324.50/$2500 in pretend currency now, and for this week: $50 on Manchester City (-1.5) vs. Burnley (at 2.30) $50 on Aston Villa to beat Bolton (2.20)
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