Oh, Google News is automated or something. I think.

Happy new year, and may it be fruitful for you.

Log

Merry Christmas to you five (5) readers.
Coincidentally, I greeted and shook hands with five people on Christmas Eve.

I seem to be sharing less and less, year by year.

‘plode

This is #100.

I just had lunch at Komala’s at Penisula, it’s pretty good, but a tad on the expensive side. Definitely much different from Brinda’s, but not without reason.

I’m giving VMware Fusion a spin right now. While the performance is atrocious compared to Parallels Desktop due to its architecture, but also purely because of its architecture, USB support works properly and I can finally use the Sony FeliCa Reader/Writer Lite (retailed to consumers as “Sony PaSoRi contactless card reader“) with no less functionality than on a PC. Now, all I need is the SDK and I’m ready to turn this into the next hobbyist replacement for what’s illustrated in RFID Toys, using an RFID tag for Windows Logon with a custom GINA for keyboard-free login (cardless, if you got a embedded RFID chip). I know it’s available for VC/C++, VB, and some less circulated Java version. A pity there’s no Mac OS X or *nux SDK available. The hardware is made in Japan.

Anyone up for making a nike.com international jumpboard lookalike? Give me a shout if you do, Flash on Rosetta isn’t very responsive.

Gregarious

Just found a rather mundane bar of candy today, perhaps you might find it boring.

The Straits Times, pg 11, refer to the Singtel ad. Under the Samsung Z560 – “Log on to home.singtel/hsdpa to experience BroadBand on Mobile for FREE!”
Perhaps SingTel is now a global organisation – that’s one-upping http://www.raffles.sg/.

Newslink doesn’t archive ads, perhaps for good reasons.

I’m still working on the subbing of Haven, but the estimated date of completion is now moved back several months. While my transcription skills are so-so, and I’ve read the script before, it’s still extremely time-consuming.

The post-Camp lunch was rather amusing, since I fell flat on my face saying grace in English.. you know who you are, make life easier for me in the future and permit me to use Chinese.

Party

I’m at camp now, it’s about 12 hours to completion, and it’s been a trying time.. certain people have absolutely no concept of friendship, and have a tendency to fire misleading signals at all the critical points.

Whether I’ll let myself get into the mood and just rest on the surf, or stick to my morose attitude remains to be seen. Floating bridge is fun while people who’re more accommodating (or are more careful with their tongue) than me are playing, it’s nearly life-threatening when the quartet assembled are better friends than expected.
We’ll see if we form our ring, but that won’t happen if the CCA doesn’t last long enough to continue the chain.

On the other hand, camp’s been an astounding ’success’ so far, much better than originally anticipated with the planning process that was executed. We’ve yet to see how things will conclude, but there’s been a very large number of divine interventions, and we’re set to end this endeavour with a pop rather than a whimper.

Melaka

I was just at Bandar Melaka over the weekend; I’m still in the process of writing the requisite article and digitising my exhibits, so it ought to be up sometime at the weekend.

Republic Poly’s a pretty decent place, a very good network infrastructure which works very well, just that the whole UT (Understanding Tests, assessments essentially) and other supporting utilities are all for Windows, and it’s likely that they’ve standardised on Acer and Fujitsu portables for the whole organisation.
Strictly no comment about the organisation there, haven’t seen enough nor heard enough to speak.

Congratulations to the team who went for NSI by RP on their 1st Runners-Up haul, and Xboxes.
As for the InnovateIT (by SMU) team, best wishes for your finals tomorrow, and we’ll try to turn up and see what magic they’ve worked. No doubts as to what they can do. It’s likely to be dependent on the amount of sleep they have or haven’t had.

Soldering isn’t that easy as it looks. Need more practice to perfect that skill.

Snoopy

So, it’s the holidays. Status update time!

It’s Advent already, and time to wind down the holiday projects. Finished a implementation ‘proposal’ for an assignment at work, and now gearing up to extend Staff Profile with features someone’s asked me to add to it.
Here’s hope towards initiation and completion before camp; it all depends on environment, environment, environment, it’s all about the abstraction available to the developer. Being both a project manager and developer at the same time is difficult, context switching is expensive.

COMPSERV has been an utterly uninteresting place recently, and it’s no longer a decent source of entertainment. We’ll see how everything turns out when the December Camp rolls around (or doesn’t). If it’s a success, great, that means that the comm is capable of packaging a camp together in the 7 days just before it. If it isn’t, there are more important things to worry about than Recruitment 2007 and internal HR and placement.
Ironically, the preparations for another camp elsewhere have been assisted by yours truly. Much better. Hey, they got nice African theme and nice tees!

In other news, there are currently got a couple of HP racks and a bunch of HP Netservers (with accompanying HP NetRaid-4M cards) sitting around being unable to do anything thanks to it being brought in for a doomed project. They’re likely to be expensive to run, ~700-800W or thereabouts.
Nope, I’m quite sure you don’t want them, they range from 2U to 8U, from two hard drive bays to about 16 or so. But one thing’s in common – they’re Pentium III systems, require HP ECC RAM, as well as SCSI hard drives, and HP hard drive trays, etc.

Plans to find the money to fix or get a new macbook are still underway, if something that’s decently profitable cannot be thought up, a new LCD panel will have to do. That’s about two years at current income levels.

I’ve found a nice article that’s somewhat related to Sphereosoft, here it is, and the connection is left as an exercise for the reader.