I never thought I would actually write this post. This is truly an act of frustration.

I humbly request each and every one of you internet users out there that are still using Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) to do any of these actions:

1. Switch to other internet browsers, like Mozilla Firefox
2. Upgrade to Internet Explorer 8

Both the above softwares can be legally downloaded for free.

Why, you might ask, the need to change? “IE6 has been working fine for me since time immemorial. Why should I bother to change?” Well my friend, let me explain.

IE6 is an old technology. It was first released 9 years ago. Since then, a lot of newer and more modern browsers have come out, like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, even Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8. These newer, modern browsers support newer technologies that allow for more engaging and interactive web experience, which many of them are not supported by IE6. We web developers are very, very keen to integrate these new technologies into the websites that we build so that you, the end user, may experience a more engaging and interactive web experience.

Building a website is not easy. We sometimes lose our sleep time and miss our dinner and lunch just writing those codes that make any website works, codes that you never have to lay your eyes upon. Because there are several different internet browsers out there that command a sizable chunk of the internet browsers market share, we have to write codes that are compatible with each of those popular browsers. Of all these web browsers, IE6 has been time and again the single most problematic web browser. It takes more time to fix the codes to make it IE6-compatible than with all the other browsers combined. It is also the single most frustrating web browser to work with for any web developer. Yes, there’s nothing more that would greatly reduce our burden than the death of IE6.

Our interests aside, some developers are already using more advanced web technology in the websites that they build, totally disregarding the inability of IE6 to support it, including Google. What this means is that you may be missing all these newer technologies that allow for more engaging and interactive web experience, if you’re still using IE6. A lot of developers are actually holding back on using these newer technologies, simply because IE6 doesn’t support them.

And then there’s the issue of security.

So you see, there’s a lot of reasons for IE6 to give way to newer browsers. Sure, it might have been the best web browser during its time, it may even have contributed a lot to the development of the web experience and internet. But we have to move on, make way for newer and better browsers to do their part. The sooner people move on from IE6, the better it is for us the web developers, for you the web users, and for the web and internet in general. Currently, there’s about 9.6% of the total internet users that are still using IE6. The number’s going down, that’s a surety, but it’s not going down fast enough. So please, change to newer browsers if you are still using IE6.

If you can install just one and only one add-on to your Firefox browser, let it be Adblock Plus.

The internet is a wonderful place, but it can be better. Internet as an advertisement medium has been growing bigger and bigger every single year. More and more companies, organisations, and websites are putting ads all over the internet. Almost everywhere you go, you’ll see those banners floating around the contents you want. Sometimes they’re benign, just a little text links pointing to websites or services that are relevant to the content you’re viewing. At other times, they’re just downright annoying, offering you prizes you could never win, or explicit images that are sure to draw unwanted attention from your friends and families passing behind you. Even worse, there are times when the only thing separating your wonderful computer from streams of obtrusive and abusive pop-ups and, the most dreaded of all, viruses and worms and spywares and what-nots, is just a single click to that fancy colourful banner image.

So yeah, there’s no doubt to that: the internet is infested with ads. They annoy us, they slow down page load, and they can trick us or appeal to that side of us we’re not so proud of.

Which is why you should never miss out from installing the Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox. It blocks almost all ads from every page you view, not just hiding them from your view, but completely blocks Firefox from even loading the ads. The result? A faster-loading, cleaner webpages everytime.

How to install Adblock Plus add-on:

1. Make sure you’re using Firefox (duh).
2. Go to Adblock Plus add-on page.
3. Click on the green “Add to Firefox” button.
4. It’s likely that a yellow bar will pop-up on top of the page, saying that “Firefox prevented this site…”. Click Allow at the top-right of the page.
5. An add-on installation window will pop-up. Wait a few seconds and click Install Now. Firefox will then download and install the add-on. When finish, close and re-open Firefox (or just click Restart Firefox).
6. When Firefox restarted, you’ll likely be presented with two pop-up windows:
   • Firefox add-on window notifying you that a new add-on has been installed. Just close this.
   • Adblock Plus filter subscription window. Just choose EasyList (USA) and click Subscribe.
7. Kiss those ads goodbye.

Note that the add-on may cause some problem with Yahoo! Mail or other websites that won’t show their content without showing ads (nasty, I know). If that happens, just disable the add-on for that particular page or website, by right-clicking on the red Adblock Plus icon at the bottom-right corner of your browser window and click “Disable on…”.

I have been wondering why Malaysia doesn’t have a minimum wage law. In New Zealand, every single employer are obligated by law to pay at least NZ$12.50 per hour to their employees, regardless of their profession or position in the company. That means everybody, including people who sweeps the floor and clean houses (a lot of students do this), gets paid at least NZ$12.50 per hour.

Which is why I was rather appalled when my mom told me that the 7 Eleven outlet near my house is paying its shopkeeper around RM650 a month, for working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. In New Zealand, the employer would be obligated by law to pay the shopkeeper at least NZ$2600 a month. That’s a lot of difference.

Currently, NZ$1.00 equals to around RM2.40. However, it is important to note that even though its currency is higher compared to us, the numerical value of the products sold there is only slightly higher than the prices over here. This means that if it costs us around RM2.50 for a packet of 10 regular-sized eggs, over there it’s only a little bit higher than that numerically, around NZ$3.00. This means that dollar-by-dollar, it follows that at least we should be paid a minimum wage of RM12.50 per hour or more. But we’re not.

Of course, introducing it now would draw a lot of fire from the businesses. But should we favour the businesses more than the people who make these businesses run?

I am no economist, and I’m not even trained in economics. I am also not a lawyer, nor am I trained in that field either. I’m an engineer in training, so perhaps other people who are more well-versed in this matter could enlighten me.

It’s amazing how far games have evolved, not just in terms of graphics, but also in terms of the physics simulation, artificial intelligence, storyline, as well as gamer’s immersibility and varied gameplay mechanics. When it comes to judging games, the best we can do is shortlist a few, and let personal preferences crown the best. With so many games within so many genres, it is equally valid for one person to say Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series as the best games ever, and another to say the title goes to The Sims series.

However, as far as graphics is concerned, there can be only one clear winner: Crysis Warhead. Released in 2008 using the same game engine as the original Crysis, it is still to date the best-looking game. Having said that, it is still nowhere near real-life looking. While the movie industry has already achieved seamless artificial world simulation, as shown by James Cameron’s Avatar, the gaming industry still has a long way to go.

I believe the limitation is due to the hardware capabilities of the consumers – our home computers are simply not powerful enough, yet. Movies like Avatar, though much of the world is simulated, are preproduced. The production company took care of all the processing power needed to render the amazingly life-like world. We just play back the movie, frame by frame, where every single frame is fixed, that the movie become nothing more than just a series of still pictures being displayed one after another, at a rate of about 25 pictures per second. This is nothing for our average computer. Whereas in games, it’s an entirely different story. Because the very nature of gaming is to allow the gamer control of the character, there’s no way to preproduce all the still pictures. Every time you move your mouse and changes the view, your computer will have to process and render what to display – including all the physics, the lightings, the shadows, the details, the colours, the shapes, the highlights, the brightness and contrasts – on the fly, in at most one twentieth of a second’s time to maintain a playable frame rate. This requires tremendous amount of processing power, so little wonder then that geek next door spent so much on his PC.

And little wonder then that when somebody has a computer powerful enough to play a game as demanding and beautiful as Crysis Warhead at the highest possible settings, he’ll be tempted to put it up on his blog . Well, that’s not the only reason I’m putting up these two videos up here, but also to show you where we are right now in terms of gaming graphics.

Note that the videos may take a while to load, depending on your connection speed. I had to increase the video quality a bit to show how beautiful the graphics are, but even then it’s far from doing justice to how it really looks. The original videos are 1.09GB and 2.66GB for a mere 2m 36s and 5m 12s respectively.

Notice: The second video contains swear words. Don’t let your little brother and sister watch it.

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

To a certain extent I believe it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that reading is just not in our culture. We don’t buy and read books like, say, we watch TV. Having said that, it does seem to me that reading is gaining popularity among teenagers, albeit slowly. But then again, maybe it’s just me. Truth is, I don’t have any reliable mechanism to gauge how often people around my age read these days, how many books and what kind of book that we read. I conducted a several-question survey some time ago asking exactly these questions. Even though I would admit that the survey was nowhere representative of the population, the result wasn’t very promising.

Generally, most of us are divided into three groups: those that read mainly fictions, those that read mainly non-fictions, and those that reads nothing else than their course textbooks and revision notes.

When I first started reading books several hundreds page long, they were all fictions. That was when I was in secondary school, and my primary reason for reading was to improve my English, which I did, apart from for fun, of course. As my English reading and writing skills gradually improve, I no longer read to improve my English, but rather, for fun. It was like watching TV, only those fiction novels provided much greater detail, most of the times for better, and sometimes for worse. During those days, I didn’t usually buy the books myself – heck, I don’t have the money. So I tend to read the books my sister bought, and because my sister didn’t only buy fiction books, so it was natural that when boredom took over and I’ve exhausted all the fiction books, I decided to pick up that inch-thick non-fiction book and took it for a ride.

Of course, it took me quite some time to finish it. Non-fiction book doesn’t have all the plot twists and turns and suspense that make fiction books so interesting. Heck, they rarely even have plots. “There’s no dialogue at all”, to quote my younger sister. A lot of people would dismiss it as mundane, and boring, and so they stick to fiction books. But somehow I got interested. After all those fiction books that I’ve read, after all those exciting stories and tales and, well, fictions, I was attracted to non-fictions. There was something more to those books, something more substantial. The stories in the non-fiction books tell a lot more than just tales for entertainment. Here was a book filled with real-world knowledge, knowledge that I can instantly apply and relate to the real world.

Of course, when people encourage you to read, they don’t mean go and read Harry Potter. When people say “you must make reading a culture”, they don’t mean to go and start collecting the entire The Lord of The Rings and related series. We all know this, whether we’d like to admit it or not. We all realise this. Reading fictions don’t give us much benefit, apart from improving our comprehension skills. When we’re already good with English, reading fictions becomes nothing more like watching TV: passive entertainment. Except that it does seem better. Nobody would scream at you for wasting your time reading book. In fact, you might even get a few compliments.

Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t read fictions at all. As long as we’re human, we’re gonna need some entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with a few good fictions now and then. I occasionally enjoy a good thriller novel, like those by Matthew Reilly, and of course The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a classic favourite. But we have to get a move on. We have to start reading for real knowledge. We have to start reading for effect.

I know, the transition wouldn’t be easy. Many non-fiction books are simply too boring or inaccessible to most of us laymen, especially when we’re just getting to know non-fictions. But once we find a secure footing and get more and more comfortable with the notion of reading non-fiction books, more and more of those books will become accessible to us. Realising that it can sometimes be a daunting task to find a good readable non-fiction books, here are a few suggestions of books that had been kind to me in my early days of reading non-fiction:

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
2. The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman
3. Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom
4. The Google Story, by David A. Vise

There are also many fiction books that have substance. The plots may have been fictitious, but they usually revolve around things that touches our very conscience, and invite us to think about things that we don’t normally give any thought about. These fiction novels will also make a good and beneficial reading. Try and look up authors such as Nick Hornby, Lionel Shriver, and Jodi Picoult.