Cameron Highland Trip

We had traveled back to Tanah Merah, Kelantan for the long weekend. On our way home, we detour to Cemeron Highland for a day trip. It had been many years since I last visited the place. I am very in fond of this place, if not because of the bumper-to-bumper traffics due to the heavy tourists season. The Highway linking Gua Musang and Cameron Highland is quite wide, it's also a feast to the eye, for the blue sky and greenery along the way. Too bad I'm driving and do not have the chance to take the photo.

There is this farm which plant all the organics vegetables. I had taken some photo of them. I remembered a old school friend, whom was told already settled in Cameron Highland. I think it must be very nice staying there and lead a simple life.

It's also an exciting route descending the hill at night time. The route is pretty winding, and I am lucky to able to follow the back of some fast driving cars, which I feel is the easiest way to drive in dark.

Paypal is finally "work" in Malaysia

I am recently approached by a Singapore company, WuTravel.com to join their advertising affiliate program. In return, they paid me a small amount as token for the sign-up. I'm quite happy with that as this is something quite unexpected for myself. At least someone do enjoy reading my trivia blog.

Anyway, this is not the main point. The point is they are paying in Paypal. And as far as i recalled, Paypal seems not money-withdrawable for the Malaysian (how sad!). Then i do a quick Google and notice it seems no longer the way. Malaysian now has a way to withdraw money from Paypal. This link is as follows:
Paypal withdrawal for Malaysian

Just some funny additional notes, I even found someone from internet try selling the method of "How Malaysian withdraw money from Paypal" (which cost around USD18)... I really wonder how much did he make... :)

Intel SSD revolutionize storage landscape

This following post shown Intel had did a good job in launching X25-M SSD:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403

I am someone always never feel satisfied by the application performance in my laptop. After using the laptop for awhile, it always felt like took ages to load an application, especially for people like me who regularly opened multiple application at the same time. I really hope I can get hold one of those SSD a day.

I am particularly amazed by the below:

Sheer Poverty

Tonight, I follow my auntie to her tenants' flat to collect the rent. The tenant had owe her two month's of the rental, thus she was thinking to stop renting the house. It's a low cost flat unit, the rent was only RM 350+.

After we reach the place, the door gate is closed and the light is off. We thought the tenant might not be at home, anyway we knocked the door to try our luck. A woman answered our call and opened the door. The woman was carrying a baby, we found out that she is his wife. The husband had not yet come back from work. So my wife called his phone to find out when he would be back, he responded should be within 20 minutes.

So, we decided to go in the house and waits for him. Apparently the light was turned off previously to save utility bill. Inside the house, we have a casual chat with his wife, meanwhile scanning around the house. The dining room doesn't have even one single piece of furniture, this is best described by the Chinese proverb - 家徒四壁 (The house with only 4 walls). My auntie and my mother entered their bedroom too, and notice there is no bed, only a sofa, and yes, no mattress too. Only the cradle for the baby.

A short while later, the husband reached home. He gave this month rental to my auntie and ask for more grace period for the remaining debt. He said he just changed job (working as a crane operator), and can't earn more overtime because of the raining season. The couple are bumiputera came from Sabah state. He told us that his grandma is ailing sick, and only "tunggu hari saja" (waiting for the days only). He is now also fretting over how to get the money to buy the air ticket back.

As you can expect, nothing much we can do, and my auntie just urged him try his best to pay punctually next time. Well, it's not as if my auntie is so unsympathetic, but she herself was amputated because of cancer last time, not leading an abundant life too.

It's quite sad to know all this. Our country is really sick after 51 years of independence due to corruption, wastefulness and squandering. While I saw some people are being filthy rich, spending RM100K+ on a watch without blinking an eye, some are worrying their infant's next meal (As my wife told me, she didn't see any milk powder in the tenant's house). This has nothing to do with race, as I myself was once become the tuition teachers to the kids of a wealthy Malay banker. And I also know some Bumiputera Datuk, who are very well-to-do.

I urge the politician be honest to your own conscience, do something right for the people, and not only filling up your own greediness. Really, you can and you should make a difference in the history, and if you are religious, the mighty one will judge you at the other world too.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea 崖の上のポニョ

I had watched the DVD 2 days ago.



This is the Hayao Miyazaki's version of "The Little Mermaid", with a happy ending. I'm quite entertained with the simple thematic elements and its visual scheme. Something good to spend your time over the weekend afternoon.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a handy utility to find out how you fare in the Google ranking. However, it's not clear how to verify you are the webmaster if you are using Blogger site. Below is great link for you to verify your site and how to add your sitemap:

http://linuxlore.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-webmaster-tools-and-howto.html

Western Media are Hypocrites

Yes, that's what i meant. After I read pages of CNN, BBC reporting on China Olympic events, I start feeling so. Come on, it's just a sports event, why can't them focus on the sports, but instead the media intermingle the political injustice into the news. Yes, you have the rights to loath China communist government. You can bashing on China relentlessly as much as you like, but please do it at another special reports, or even you can specifically produce a series on this topic. You don't need to continuously demonize the Chinese government and remind the readers how evil are the Chinese leaders. This shows how hypocritical is the western media, and only one explanation for this, is that they feel sour about the rising of the nation. For me, I believe majority of the Chinese only wish to strive for a better tomorrow and integrate into the international community. Most of them never thought of dominate or conquer other people like most power fanatic politician, which the media try to portray about China.

A dancer performs during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing, China. (Jeff Gross/Getty Images)

Drummers perform during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Adam Pretty/Getty Images)

An artist in a space suit performs during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Vladimir Rys/Bongarts/Getty Images)

Fireworks explode over the National Stadium during the Opening Ceremony for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games at the National Stadium on August 8 in Beijing. (Clive Rose/Getty Images)

Artists perform during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games at the National Stadium, also known as the "Bird's Nest", on August 8, 2008. The three-hour show at Beijing's iconic national stadium was set to see more than 15,000 performers showcase the nation's ancient history and its rise as a modern power. (AFP PHOTO / Olivier Morin)

Percussionists take part in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8, 2008. (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)

Percussionists hit their Fou drums at the start of the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8, 2008. (AFP PHOTO / Joe Klamar )

Percussionists with their Fou drums stand prior to the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8, 2008. (AFP PHOTO / Jewel Samad)

Artists perform around an illuminated Globe during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

Artists perform during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony on August 8, 2008 at the National Stadium in Beijing. Over 10,000 athletes from some 200 countries are going to compete in 38 differents disciplines during the event, between August 9 to 24. (WILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images)

The Olympic rings are illuminated during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Photo by Adam Pretty/Getty Images)

Artists underneath movable boxes perform during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

Martial arts dancers perform during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

Lighted dancers perform during the opening ceremony for the Beijing 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Friday, Aug. 8, 2008. (AP Photo/David Phillip)

Drummers perform during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Vladimir Rys/Bongarts/Getty Images)

Artists perform during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

Performers cheer during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

Fireworks light the sky over the National Aquatics Center (L) and the National Stadium during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Lars Baron/Bongarts/Getty Images)

An artist performs, suspended by wires during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Jeff Gross/Getty Images)

Drummers perform during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Photo by Adam Pretty/Getty Images)

A musician performs during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony on August 8, 2008 at the National Stadium in Beijing. (WILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images)

Performers are pictured during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

A dancer is silhouetted as she performs during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing. (Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

Children of migrant workers from outlying provinces look at themselves in the mirror as they use their hands to form the Olympic Rings after watching the TV live broadcast of the Olympic Games opening ceremony at their quarters August 8, 2008 on the outskirts of Beijing. (Andrew Wong/Getty Images)

A lonely house. An image made using Blender 3D

How do you know your page rank?

This is a nice site to check out your web site popularity:

http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/

Which is the better car?

The latest fiasco about the Proton Perdana versus Mercedes Benz was really the much awaited dessert after the heavy meal of Anwar’s sodomy conspiracy.

Back to the little story about Proton Holdings Berhad’s (KLSE: PROTON, stock-code 5304) top range Perdana V6 Executives. It’s awesome just how much the cost of ownership is to maintain a V6 and taking the cue from the estimated RM132,357.36 maintenance cost for a single car from 2004 as reported, it would whack a cool RM33,089.34 a year just to ensure the national car can roll on the road. Holy cow! That’s really a good money generator for Proton and could easily put Mercedes Benz and BMW to shame. No wonder the Terengganu’s Chief Minister (Menteri Besar) was quick to conclude it would be more economical to change the fleet to 14 RM245,000 (I thought such model costs at least RM340,00 each?) Mercedes E200 Kompressors (for RM3.43 million) as it’s no brainer that in the long run the Germany car was the solution to prevent such huge “leakages”.

Of course people started to curse the Chief Minister for being lavish during such period but can you really blame him for such a shocking maintenance cost? The Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) was surprisingly fast in their action to probe into the high costs of maintenance with the Chief Minister cheekily told the ACA to be equally efficient into other high-profile projects such as the prestigious Monsoon Cup sailing event and the Islamic Civilisation Park. Obviously irregularities can be seen all over the place in this Proton Perdana V6 Executives’ maintenance cost case.

Nevertheless you do not need a rocket scientist to jack-up the repairs or services charges at other workshops since Proton said its records showed that there had been no warranty claims made on that particular vehicle (cost more than RM100,000 in repairs and maintenance) since October 2004. However Proton Holdings Bhd managing director Syed Zainal Abidin Syed Mohamed Tahir claimed the average maintenance cost for each Perdana car sent by the Terengganu Government was only RM542 per year (huh?). So some geniuses must have pocketed the differences.

The question is do you have that many foreign dignitaries or VVIPs visiting Terengganu? If not wouldn’t it be more practical to sell or auction it off? I’m sure many interested parties would snap the Mercedes Benzes even at 20 percent discount. At least by selling it off the state could cut lost and it’s better to lose RM686,000 than to spend RM3.43 million keeping the cars in the cold storage. But then how could the PM say anything else when he himself spent huge amount of money on yacht and luxury jet? Maybe the government should consider Toyota Camy or Honda Accord for reliability.

What People Search For On Internet

Millions of searches are conducted each day on popular search engines by people all around the world. What are they looking for? A number of major search engines provide a way to glimpse into the web's query stream to discover the most popular search keywords or topics. These are:

• AOL Hot Searches: Top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories.
  


• Ask IQ: See top searches at Ask.
  
  
• Dogpile SearchSpy: Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service.
  
  
• Google Trends: Allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on.
  Compare multiple terms, as well. See our review:
  Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches.
  
  
• Google Zeitgeist:
  What people are searching for at Google and its associated specialty services in a variety of categories. There are versions for various countries, as well.
  
  
• Lycos 50: Long-standing service showing top searches at Lycos each week.
  
  
• MSN Search Insider: Top 200 queries on MSN Search (annoyingly in random order), top "movers" in TV, sports and music, and a "duels" feature pitting top queries in a race against each other.
  
  
• Yahoo Buzz Index:
  Shows you what's hot and what's not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.

Good way to be anonymous

If you need to always work from different locations, for example, work from office HQ, then travel to client side; and surfing web after coming back to home at night, this may be the right tool for you:

1. Firefox 3, plus
2. FoxyProxy

If you want to go one step further, to be able surf anonymously, also use TOR, and i found this one particularly useful which doesn't required you to install the application, look out for this app:

PortableTOR

This is a standalone application which can even be run from USB pen drive. It can be very handy if you don't like the idea to install some additional program on your PC.

Data Warehouse Landscape update

Year 2007 Gartner Report update:




















The use of SQL Server 2005 for data warehousing is accelerating... Do you think given time it will catch up with Oracle?

You will not know if you are younger than 60 years old

Yesterday having tea time with my old colleague, who is a veteran IT professional who have been in this line since 70's ... The conversation had added knowledge to me. I found that is was so interesting at one time:
- Software always came with free, and given out free by IBM to MAS. There is no SLA, it's up to the airline to change the code to cater their needs.
- There are limited software vendors at that time, airlines used to buy software from one another.
- Airlines is one of the pioneer embrace IT, at one time, the head of IT in Maybank and Southern Bank were came from MAS.
- Mainframe is so robust that it doesn't down even running for a decade.
- ...
i enjoy the conversation a lot.

Beauty of low profile

Out of curiousity, I wonder why Cisco attract less hostile public comments compare to Microsoft. Cisco dominance in networking is comparable to Microsoft's dominance in software. I did a quick yahoo search and get the following data:

DIRECT COMPETITOR COMPARISON

CSCO ALU JNPR NT Industry Market Cap: 156.78B 16.04B 13.99B 3.56B 379.45M Employ­ees: 61,535 76,410 6,111 32,550 419 Qtrly Rev Growth (yoy): 10.40% 35.20% 31.30% 11.10% 28.30% Revenue (ttm): 38.61B 28.05B 3.03B 11.22B 174.38M Gross Margin (ttm): 64.46% 33.28% 67.67% 42.40% 48.20% EBITDA (ttm): 10.98B 1.52B 694.97M 871.00M 6.30M Oper Margins (ttm): 24.07% -2.78% 16.25% 4.81% 0.36% Net Income (ttm): 7.97B -6.51B 404.54M -992.00M 2.81M EPS (ttm): 1.280 -2.459 0.712 -1.992 0.10 P/E (ttm): 20.73 N/A 37.43 N/A 20.73 PEG (5 yr expected): 1.24 2.36 1.11 2.09 1.24 P/S (ttm): 4.21 0.61 4.65 0.34 1.29

ALU = Alcatel-Lucent

JNPR = Juniper Networks, Inc.

NT = Nortel Networks Corp.

Industry = Networking & Communication Devices

As oppose to Microsoft,

DIRECT COMPETITOR COMPARISON

	MSFT	GOOG	IBM	ORCL	Industry
Market Cap:	256.02B	178.09B	171.60B	115.70B	236.31M
Employ­ees:	79,000	19,156	386,558	74,674	185
Qtrly Rev Growth (yoy):	0.40%	41.50%	11.20%	21.20%	17.00%
Revenue (ttm):	57.95B	18.12B	101.26B	21.02B	106.42M
Gross Margin (ttm):	79.35%	59.76%	42.49%	77.17%	71.24%
EBITDA (ttm):	23.10B	6.51B	20.91B	8.66B	12.75M
Oper Margins (ttm):	36.77%	29.89%	15.41%	34.58%	1.01%
Net Income (ttm):	16.42B	4.51B	10.89B	5.09B	422.82K
EPS (ttm):	1.721	14.463	7.666	0.973	N/A
P/E (ttm):	15.97	39.20	16.30	23.08	22.06
PEG (5 yr expected):	1.28	1	1.33	1.23	1.25
P/S (ttm):	4.55	10.17	1.74	5.68	2.49

GOOG = Google Inc.

IBM = International Business Machines Corp.

ORCL = Oracle Corp.

Industry = Application Software

From my humble opinion, this can be an exhibits of the beauty of being low profile. It's not as if Cisco is a company which is seldom heard of, no, Cisco is a respectable company. But they don't publicly single-handed dictates the market. Sometimes, when you are eating the bigger share of pies, it's even more important for you to stay low and collaborate with the others. No doubt Microsoft will continue to drive a lot of competitors out of business, but that's also the price they need to pay for their big bully image.