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…”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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It was awesome. The trail started from the small town of Brinchang, at about 1500m up towards the peak of Mt. Brinchang at 2031m through jungle trail, and down again through paved road that winds down the mountain, passing along vegetable farms and tea plantation. The total distance was about 11km. We took about 4 hours and 30 minutes to complete the hike, photo-taking and rest-stop inclusive.

Pictures can never do justice to the wonderful scenery we encountered along the way. The best view of all during the trail was by a sheer cliff in the middle of the jungle. The trail was easy in the beginning, but it got significantly steeper and taxing as we got near the peak. Couple that with muddy soil, and it makes the trip definitely worthy of the 1 hour and a half drive up Cameron Highlands. Oh yeah, it was cold as well. And clean air. Breathing was a bliss.

It was rather amusing when we got to the top, because there’s a group of people there cooking something on the portable stove, camper’s style. Their clothes and shoes show no sign of going through the climb we just did. Apparently, they went up the peak by car.

There was a lookout tower at the peak, and a number of communications tower. It was accessible by car, but the view from the lookout tower was not as amazing as the one we encountered in the middle of the jungle. Yeah, the best things in life don’t come easy.

My next plan: Endau-Rompin National Park. Probably will go there next month. We’ll see.

[Show as slideshow]

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But in reality, though we live side by side, we don’t live with each other. Our racial harmony may well be a by-product of ignorance, of not caring what the other races are doing, of non-interfering and very little interaction with each other, limited to only the occasional meeting in taxis and sundry shops and checkout lanes, where even then we barely talk to each other. This is certainly nothing to be proud of. Instead of the individual races being interwoven with each other to create the very fabric of our multiracial society, it is more like separate strands of ropes that don’t even touch.

Why is this so? I believe that in part – a huge part – our education system is to blame for. For any kids, schools are the best place for them to make friends. Many of us live in a racially clustered society – the Malays live where most (if not all) of the neighbours are Malays, and the same goes for the Chinese and Indians. The only place we can really bring our kids together is at school. And yet the Chinese and Indians send their kids to vernacular schools, where the other races make up of maybe less than 5% of the population. The Malays send their sons and daughters to boarding schools, where again less than 5% of the population are of the other races. In fact, in many boarding schools, there are no Chinese or Indian students at all. Little wonder then when these Malay kids and Chinese kids and Indian kids finish school and join the larger Malaysian society, they don’t know how to react with the reality of our social fabric.

I should know this. I’ve been in boarding school since I was 13. But I had a tad more luck than many of my friends. Right after I finished SPM (and my 5 years of non-interaction with friends of other races), I did my pre-university education in a private school in Kota Damansara. Of course, due to the generally less-financially-capable Malays, it was mainly the Chinese that send their kids to the school. But due to Petronas sending its scholars to this school, it’s International Baccalaureate community is rather balanced between the races. And this close interaction with the other Chinese and Indian friends forced me to really rethink my perception towards the other races in Malaysia. After years and years of living in a closed society – living alongside my own kind – this was not easy to do. I revolted. But in time, I learned to accept our differences. In time, I understood them better.

It is an inevitable consequence that without interaction, there can be no understanding, and without understanding comes all sorts of hostility and anxiety. Conscious racial harmony is simply not possible, for how can you really accept living with other people when really, you don’t even know them. Many of my friends continued their study in boarding colleges where again, very little of the population are made up of other races than Malay. I pity them, and I wonder how they’ll turn out when they leave the education world and enter the working world.

Fixing this is not easy. There have to be a major rethinking of our national education system. The Chinese and Indians would have to give up vernacular schools. The Malays have to give up boarding schools. The national schools structure have to be revamped to include the Mandarin and Tamil languages that the Chinese and Indians will surely want their children to retain. The Malays have to recognise that quality education can exist in the national schools, especially if the boarding schools no longer drain the good brains from all these national schools. These are but a tiny portion of what have to be thought and discussed about. But if we are to have a truly multiracial Malaysia where we really live with each other, not just alongside each other, somewhere along the line it has to be done. The individual racial strings can only go their separate ways for so long before they intermingle in a tight knot, and I’m sure none of us would want that.

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And then sometimes (like once or twice a week, maybe), I stumble around in Facebooks, answering friend requests (more like accepting, really), replying to some wall posts, or posting something on other people’s walls, or view other people photos. And yes, there bound to be something funny there too, sometimes. This is what I found this time:

Credits to Shaza Hakim for retweeting the tweet from flisterz for the Twilight Moms image, and Awie Gaucho for the Spongebob IC in Facebook, and Amira Khairuddin through whose profile I stumbled across the image.

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But take all those sounds, add a tad of creativity and a certain supply of free time (and boredom), you’d get something else. Somebody actually combined and mixed those sounds into a song, and I have to admit it’s rather impressive (and amusing as well).

There’s a few variant of songs made entirely from Windows sounds. This particular song below is composed by a person that goes by the name Robbi-985. From what I know, he was the first person that originally created a song from Windows sounds. He used only the sounds from Windows 98 and Windows XP.

Click the play button below to listen:

You can view the original video posted by the author on YouTube.

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But it is not this definition in the Malaysian Constitution that this post will center upon, but rather, this association of religion to a certain ethnic, namely the association of Islam to the Malay ethnic. Today, at least in this country, Islam and Malay are so well-associated that whatever the Malays do, many would think that that is what Islam teaches its followers to do. That in itself presents immediate disadvantage to the religion itself, for race and religion are very different things. Ethnicity develops through time, through assimilation with the surrounding and the environment within which a certain group of people live for generations. This assimilation brings about countless adjustments and additions to how this certain group of people live their daily lives over the ages. This is what gives rise to culture. Religion, on the other hand, is based entirely on principles that  are sent down by God Himself.

When you try to assimilate these two very different sets of belief, there will no doubt be differences and conflicts. The reason why the Malay ethnic and Islam seems so well-acquainted with each other today is because Islam has been introduced to the Malays for hundreds of years. Much of the differences and conflicts has been ironed out in the past. For all practical purposes, Islam has been assimilated into the Malay’s way of life (note the order of what gets assimilated into what).

However, cultural values that precedes religion for many, many years are not easy to go away. The Malays still retain much of its cultural values today. Because (at least in Malaysia) the two are so well associated, much of what is actually Malay cultural values and rituals are mistaken to be Islamic teachings. This association is so well-ingrained that many of the Malays themselves believe a lot of these mis-attributions.

Another immediate negative effect of this assimilation is that Islamic teachings are no longer understood the way it is meant to be. Much of what is taught to the younger generations of the Malay ethnic regarding Islam is over-simplified right down to only the necessary rituals, and most of the time the core values of kindheartedness, responsibility, perseverance, and  a myriad of other values that define Islam itself gets sidelined. Parents teach their children to perform the daily prayers, read the Quran, observe fasting, but very little of the core values of Islam actually get passed down. The same pattern can be seen in the syllabus of Islamic Education taught in national schools. As a result, many Malays today perform the prayers, read the Quran and observe fasting simply because they are taught to do so instead of really understanding the reasons that belie these obligations. Without proper understanding, not only do they make Islam seems unfavourable to the other ethnicities, these obligations also become nothing more than just rigid rituals, and much of the values that once put Islam on top of the world got lost in this ritualistic rigidity.

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Anyways, I’ve just finished the last project for this semester, the Truss Bridge project for the Introduction to Engineering Design course in the University of Auckland. Curious to learn how to use Sony Vegas Pro (a video-making software), I’ve decided to put together this short video about the project. Enjoy!

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