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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+ entry views: 3669 today's page views: 672 (45 mobile) all-time page views: 3246142 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1214 page created Thu Apr 17, 2025 20:58:08 |
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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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The more-or-less-annual football gathering at TCHS on Saturday, where my yellow boots with studs got their first outing, and proved useful on grass if a tad clumsy on solid surfaces. Ignored the elliptical trainer to watch Own Goal score a hat-trick for United against beleaguered Portsmouth. Sunday saw a trip down to Johor Bahru with my cousins for a spot of shopping, whereupon I discovered that it was not much more inconvenient than going to central Singapore - it is just seven MRT stations away to Kranji, compared to about twelve for the City Hall area, although an additional S$1 bus trip is needed to get across the Causeway to the Malaysian immigration complex.  Inside a Causeway Link bus (photo credit: lwei) The complex is however but one pedestrian bridge from the City Square shopping centre, which has a large selection of stores, and more pointedly, prices that are approximately half that of malls across the border - and that's before further discounts. One might suspect that the Singapore government would be concerned about the outflow of currency, but not to worry, the place is majority owned by them in any case.  Bowl is smaller than it appears (photo credit: lwei) Some strolling and spending later (including a cab ride down to Holiday Plaza), we had dinner at the Kim Gary restaurant at food court prices, where I reflected upon the merits of making purchases in Malaysia. The next time I require a good shirt, for instance, I would be tempted to have it made to measure there. The only negative I got from the trip was spraining my right thumb, in a manner that I would prefer not to relate. Here, I should mention that housing is also far more affordable in Johor, with a recent Straits Times feature (reproduced here) on Singaporeans buying property there (salient quote: "Every month I pay a S$630 instalment on the [S$125000 and 2,140 sq ft] house which is less than the S$800 I pay for my car - and I can't live in my car!"). Seriously worth consideration, especially if better transport links are developed between Singapore and Johor. Revisiting the wage-to-housing price ratio, a bit of searching suggests that my initial estimates may have been a bit overboard. From here, the average household income in 1982/83 was S$1724 (see page 7), while it was S$7090 by 2008 (see page 3). Then, comparing apples to apples, housing prices would have kept pace with wages if they increased by 311% from 1982 to 2008. Available figures from 1981 show that new five-room flats cost anywhere between S$72900 to S$126400 then (after subsidies), from which we might expect such flats to cost from S$300000 to S$520000 today. Although, as Mr. Tan Kin Lian noted, prices for new flats are hard to come by, it appears that they do fall within this range; Indeed, according to the HDB, current prices for new five-room flats are anywhere from S$229000 to S$428000 (see page 10), and a quick search on resale five-room flats in Jurong West on the HDB InfoWEB shows an average price of about S$372000, for over 1000 transactions. Ang Mo Kio has an average price of some S$493000, for 168 transactions. Offhand, it may seem that incomes have kept pace with housing prices after all, but in that case it is strange that our Minister for National Development, and even our Minister Mentor, have acknowledged the issue instead of trotting out the facts. It may then be that statistics don't tell the whole story, and a few considerations spring out:
In summary, a definitive conclusion cannot be made without the right data, though my hunch is that if a minister admits that there may be a problem, there likely is one. More transparency would be appreciated, or a house fifteen minutes from the border would begin to look more and more like a realistic option. Monday was upgrade day, as I resolved to try out Windows 7 on my home desktop. Considering that I have been using Windows XP since 2002 (having wisely skipped Vista), this had the potential to be a big plunge. It ended up being painless, however, and I even kept XP installed as a fallback, by partitioning my original system drive into two, and then installing Win7 into the empty half (which still had 250GB)  Aero Flip 3D (WinKey+Tab) Triple-booting is now an absolute breeze compared to a few years back, as Win7 automatically sets up a boot menu for the user. Half an hour later, I had a clean install zooming along with no startup junk, and access to all my existing data. Applications were another issue - some of them couldn't start as-is, since they were registered in XP - but this was quickly fixed by designating a new Programs File folder, and re-installing vital apps there. Yes, there is some redundancy going on, but who cares when hard disk space is so plentiful? Following that, I transferred my Google Chrome history by copying the appropriate folder, as well as my trusty MSN emoticons (again) with Emoticon Made Easy. Windows Live Messenger itself had to be run in compatibility mode to minimize to the system tray, which now expands neatly into a box, and not distractingly sideways. Win7 meanwhile downloaded a load of patches through Windows Update, which has finally been decoupled from Internet Explorer. Some tweaking was required to adjust the user interface to my liking; I finally ditched the trusty Windows Classic theme for the spiffiness of Aero, but returned the screen resolution from 1280x1024 to 1024x768, and set the taskbar to use small icons without autocombining of icons, for the XP feel. The Show Desktop button is now at the bottom right, but this makes sense as one can just drag the mouse pointer down in that direction and click, without having to visually locate the icon to the right of the Start button as was previously the case (or one could always just use WinKey+D...).  Tidier than ever Having said that, yummy eye candy and some usability improvements aside, there probably isn't an overwhelmingly pressing need for XP users to migrate, though new buyers might as well grab Win7 (not that they will have a choice after Microsoft phased the old workhorse out). The thing is, despite looking far slicker, and boasting a bunch of new features, I daresay Win7 would be little more than a tuned XP to most (if you don't believe me, scan that feature list and tell me how many of those are truly revolutionary) Windows 7 does run everything I want it to speedily and flawlessly, and hasn't crashed yet, which is an achievement in itself; I'll continue using it as my main operating system, which is probably the highest praise I can give it. Amusingly, the latest Facebook revamp has adopted the Windows 7 "type in the first few letters of what you want to access it" paradigm.  Facebook knows where you've been, and offers sound financial advice On Tuesday, I finally went from masterless rōnin to actually having an official supervisor (or two). This should be - is - good news, except that I'll be somewhat busier from now on. As well I should be.  Likely slightly buggy, certainly free Therefore, I have paused development on my little tool to save myself time checking if my comics (and other stuff, but mostly comics) have been updated; Google Chrome has always won plaudits for its speed, but the lack of plug-ins kept not a few users from migrating. Now that Google Extensions are finally out, I couldn't resist whipping up one for myself. What gPageAlrt does is to periodically (default: once every hour) check each of a list of URLs, and if any of them has changed since the last check, mark it as such (the little red number by the icon shows how many such URLs there are). Some webpages (such as this one) contain dynamic information that changes each time the page is accessed (e.g. hit count, random quotes), and therefore the obvious implementation that hashes the content would not be useful. The approach taken was to access each page twice in quick succession when adding it, and then diff the data, to obtain possibly multiple fragments that do not include that dynamic information. There are of course still situations in which this won't work (e.g. when updates are on the ends of a fragment, or dynamic information that is not per-second or per-reload based), but this has been sufficient for my purposes. Another optimization would be to detect and hash RSS feeds whenever possible, but I'll leave all these for the future. Ironically, it probably will never recoup the day I spent coding it, but what the heck. In local news, there has been another thunderstorm in a teacup, as a pastor got hauled up for "trivialising and insulting the beliefs of Buddhists and Taoists". Personally, he's just being forthright, if insensitive. A devout person has to believe that his religion is true and others' are false to some extent, so the only thing is whether one quietly believes that, or shouts it to the world. And the world moves on. Next: Interview With A Hamtire
anonymous said... how can u pause development on your little tool. confucius say little tool can become big tool with abit of stroking
Mr. Fish F. Chips said... Mr Fish say how much confucius pay you to spam comment promoting his movie
anonymous said... why don't you ask him in heaven
Mr. Fish F. Chips said... knn u never burn ferrari for me how i go
anonymous said... burn your cock hair lah
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