Singapore's getting quite a lashing this morning, so my dad and I have camped out at the O'Brien's sandwich bar at Jelita. Back when my school had its campus at Ulu Pandan, I'd go to Jelita all the time for Pizza Hut. Now it's an Irish sandwich shop, go figure :)
UPDATE: Typical, I hit the Draft button instead of Publish, again! The timestamp for the photo was around 10am today.
We knew it was a big story when our trending topic eclipsed the #WorldCup, yeesh!
So it was quite early in the morning and my dad and I were in our rental car heading to our self storage room thingy to load up some boxes. As we left the apartment we noticed the clouds was dark even by Singapore tropical storm standards, but fortunately it was only spitting. We thought the sky had better be careful, because spitting in public here is an offense punishable with a steep fine.
Move forward ten minutes and we were on the PIE and the visibility was so poor we could barely see the car in front of us. As a consequence, traffic was moving along at Bangkok speeds; at one point a poor person in what looked like was once a clean pressed business shirt vainly clutching a newspaper above his head was moving faster than we were.
You get used to tropical storms living here, but these onset of these freak storms are so sudden you can never be prepared for them! One such surprise was seeing the banks of the deep canal that runs along Bukit Timah Road almost full to the brim, and people soon started flooding (hah, sorry) Twitter with photos of Orchard Road (dubbed the Times Square of Southeast Asia!) completely flooded with people attempting to get out of submerged cars and buses.
My dad and I were so nervous driving with all the incoming water we pulled into Jelita and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee, as I blogged earlier. That part of the day was good :)
Given it's location and the fact the whole country is built on a shallow island barely wider than a 40km diameter grilled cheese sandwich, the Singapore government spends a ridiculous amount of money on storm water drainage systems. Back in 2007 they figured the Dutch of all people would have experience with building water control systems so they imported the world's largest water pumps:
SINGAPORE : Singapore’s flood control measures will go one step further after the Marina Barrage becomes operational by the end of this year.
Works are currently underway to install drainage pumps next to the reservoir. These pumps are the world’s largest and are specially brought in from the Netherlands. Their job is to drain out excess water during flooding. Each pump weighs 28 tonnes, or about the weight of 400 men.
When operational, it will be able to drain, in one minute, an amount of water that can fill up an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Perhaps they need to put in a few more of these bad boys after all ;).
As expected Twitter was all abuzz (sorry Google!) with the news, with people uploading all kinds of amazing photos. My dad and I were driving around the Marina Bay area so we didn't see any flooding, but I took a few crappy camera phone pictures of the city obscured by all this heavy rain.
I really, REALLY need to start carrying around my DSLR and lens everywhere, my D60 with the NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8 barely weighs anything so I really don't have an excuse. They would have taken some amazing shots today. Oh well, live and learn.
As for Orchard, I just walked down it a few minutes ago and the water seems to have receded, though the whole area is full of police cars. I commented on Twitter that I wasn't sure what police expected to do, unless they were going to attempt arresting the flood water. I suppose they could freeze it then handcuff it.
There was a discussion on Slashdot this morning about WiFi access at Starbucks in the States, so I added my own SG$0.02 about the free access here.
Probably not all that relevant to this discussion, but my SG$0.02.
All the Starbucks branches here in Singapore have free WiFi provided you register first, it’s part of the government’s Wireless@SG initiative, which I can forgive the corny 1990s name for because it Just Works. The irony is this free internet is faster and more reliable than the ADSL I was paying a small fortune for back in Australia!
There’s a huge coffee shop culture here. It’s really fascinating to see Starbucks (and Coffee Bean, and Killiney etc), even at 11pm they’re absolutely packed with students studying on their MacBooks and business folk frantically typing away. I asked a few local friends why, and mostly it’s because apartments here are so small an overpriced cup of coffee is a small price to pay for a comfy chair, relaxing music and a place to do some work on the Internets without your siblings making noise in your ear.
Links shared from del.icio.us today:
For those of you wondering what's been up with my uncharacteristically long break from tweeting and blogging (still don't like that word much), I've spent the better part of a week helping my old man organise this giant mess of boxes we call a self storage room and an apartment we only moved into back in 2007.
We've been making a lot of tough decisions and getting rid of stuff we don't need. It's a cliche but accurate observation that for far too long possessions have owned us, instead of the other way around.
Still got all my late mum's stuff to go through too. I thought I was strong enough to, but apparently I'm not. Fortunately my sister is a dynamo.
Just a quick post about a FreeBSD problem I solved, for what it may be worth.
After adding a new FireWire 800 PCI card that also draws power from a small floppy drive Molex connector, the older Athlon XP 2800+ host started hanging on boot with the following error:
hptrr: no controller detected
A quick Google search showed it was a hard drive related problem, which was strange considering the drive had been operating just fine.
After much head scratching, I determined the relatively crappy PSU simply couldn't take one more peripheral, so I upgraded it from a 350W to a 450W. FreeBSD now detects and boots from the hard drive just fine, and my FireWire PCI card works.
Lesson learned: if you encounter the above error it's most likely the result of a recent hardware addition, and that even though a hard drive error may be a symptom, it may not be the cause. That counts as that whole Lateral Thinking thing, right?
It's past the stage where we can laugh and call Senator Stephen Conroy a hapless, bumbling boob who espouses Ted Stevens School of Internets ideals, it's time to start acknowledging him as a grave and real threat to the privacy and security of Australians.
After indigently pushing through with plans for his brainchild mandatory internet filter, Senator Conroy now wants internet providers to log their customers internet usage including sites visited and emails sent, in a similar vein to the WiFi hotspot record keeping proposed in Europe. Once again kudos to ZDNet Australia for their excellent coverage of this.
When arguing against the proposed internet filter, I figured even if the ethical and legal questions were legitimate they were superfluous given such a system would simply fail technologically. I joked on Twitter that it was like arguing the ethical and legal qualms with having lead balloons. In this case, allow me to briefly indulge.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV or Twitter, but I have to think there are some serious laws being broken here, and at least a few United Nations charter thingys. Whatever happened to those quaint ideas that you're innocent until proven guilty and that you need probable cause and authorisation from a judge before you can start intercepting a private citizen's communiqués?
It seems far fetched, but this is no different from the government deciding they'll start opening and scanning all snail mail, recording phone calls and photographing smoke signals. Some tin foil hat wearers say such things are already happening, but for those of us without the self esteem to be seen in public wearing such things it certainly seems like yet another thing to be genuinely worried about.
Okay now that stuff is out of the way, time to move into the area that pays my bills and I like to pretend I know something about.
I usually vote for The Greens but their preferences go to Labor. The conservative Liberal and National parties have issued nothing other than off the cuff remarks and certainly no thorough repudiations of these draconian policies. It's become cliche to say we'll vote for the lesser of two evils, but what do you do when both parties are evil?
I think on election day this year I'll just quietly sob in the corner of my room with a big tub of ice cream and watch some moeblob anime. That is, if the latter is still available and wouldn't flag me as a suspect.
While receiving little in the way of tangible benefits, blogging has turned out to be a great way to speak my mind and ultimately to relax… perhaps this is the reason I post entries the most when I'm the most busy! Other times though, mean people ruin the fun.
For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you may have seen this evening I posted about an email I got from someone claiming I was unfair about my coverage of Windows on my blog, and suggested I should remove the dedication of my mum from here because clearly neither her or I are "impressive".
I don't want to post the email here because I haven't asked their permission, and even if they weren't going to lend me any courtesy it doesn't mean I'll stoop to their level.
Okay first of all, with specific regards to the whole Windows thing, I admit my discussions of it here may be somewhat one sided owing to the fact I don't use it in a production environment anymore, save for some old versions for nostalgia and a copy of Windows 7 in a VM for emergencies.
As I thought I'd made it clear on several occasions though, my primary emotion about Windows is not anger, but rather disappointment and general frustration. I grew up on Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, 2000 and XP up to SP1 before moving over to the Mac and F/OSS. I started to learn programming with QBasic and QPascal. I spent my HSC 11 and 12 years programming .NET with C++ and C#. Even until fairly recently I still used Excel because I thought it was the best spreadsheet app.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is when I talk about Windows I'm not just a Mac fanboy heaping on the Microsoft hate, I am speaking from previous experience. And that experience tells me Microsoft's best GUI design days are long over, that security is proven not claimed, that FUD and bogus studies are as digestible as astroturf, and despite all the suspiciously saccharine reviews of Windows 7 I still think it's a subpar OS for home users and fulfills perceived interface envy needs to the detriment of its business users who just want to get their work done and go home. Oh yeah, and all the different versions designed to confuse customers out of money, don't get me started.
Yes, that was an intentional pun on the Windows 95 advertising campaign. I was only in primary school but I can still remember it!
As for the comments about my mum, let me just make one thing clear. Despite all my tough talk about standards being my number one concern, there is only one thing in life I took seriously before 2007: my mum. After 2007 there is only one thing I take seriously: the memory of my mum.
You can trash talk me all you want, I'm fair game, but bringing a person at rest into a discussion like this is tasteless and shows they have no class. That's all I'll say about it.
Looking forward to seeing what Apple delivers at WWDC this year. Some quicky thoughts thingys:
Even if you don't follow Apple or don't use their products, don't fret: the Android people will no doubt taking meticulous notes to copy all Apple's features, implementations and interfaces of said features so you'll probably have them later this year with 2.4 Cherry Fudge Pie or whatever it is. In the case of Microsoft, you'll have them by 2013 ;).
I jest of course, Apple needs competition to keep them on their toes. Speaking of which, where's the new HP WebOS phone? I'd get one of those in a heartbeat, WebOS is beautiful.
Ladies and gentlemen there comes a time in a bloggers life where he must take the time to discuss something that may seem trivial at first but is in fact critical to the infrastructure of the net and ultimately to its very survival. I'm talking of course about the phrase "after the jump", hereafter referred to as ATJ to spare you having to read it again.
To cast this post in the proper context, let me start by saying I'm aware that I'm not an ideal blogger. I sportaically talk about a wide array of topics. During periods of absense I explain why I was gone. My grammar and spelling are The Terrible. While these alleged vices may be irrirating to some, I am confident none can eclipse the sheer pain inducing awfulness that is the ATJ phrase.
For those of you fortunate enough to have not encountered this, authors who write blog posts will typically type this godawful phrase after a short description, blurb or summary of a post to let their readers know there's more to it, as if they're too stoopid to figure this out for themselves without being talked to like an infant.
I can't ascertain when this cutesy, awful phrase started being used by cliche "Web 2.0" authors that are so hip they can't see over their own pelvises, but as with Flash and external JavaScript comment systems it seemed to be dying out only to have a baffling resurgence. Its as if collectively they've decided they can best serve the web community by making their readers want to claw their eyes out then bash what's remaining of their heads against a wall until they're in a world where they don't have to read such phrases anymore.
Firstly, from a practical standpoint using such a phrase doesn't make sense. ATJ takes 15 characters to type and reproduce when phrases such as "read more" or "continued" take far less. They're making more work for themselves and their system administrators who must maintain ever larger and larger databases with their useless text in them. Any CompSci major will tell text is expensive to serve, almost as much as streaming video.
Secondly, they're condescending, patronising and insulting to readers. ATJ implies we're unaware as to the function of hyperlinks, a baffling conclusion for a blog author to come to when you consider most people would have arrived at their blog by doing a search and clicking said hyperlinks.
Thirdly, to demonstrate that no jumping is involved when people use the ATJ phrase, enclosed below is an image of Taneshima Popura jumping. Notice how she can balance a precariously positioned beverage on a serving tray while doing so. How many people who claim to have websites with ATJs all over the place can claim their site is doing that, let alone themselves!?
As I said above, this phrase's resurgence is perhaps the most worrying aspect of all of this. Whereas it was once confined to gadget blogs it seems every second photography site now uses it, and general bloggers have started using it to appear more legit, whatever that means. Even Google discusses summaries for their Blogger service by referring to them as BTJ and ATJ… shocking.
Perhaps the worst perpetrators of this crime now are anime bloggers. It seems to be an unwritten requirement that if your blog is hosted with AnimeBlogger.net you must sprinke the ATJ phrase over every post you or your nine hundred other writers write. Don't believe me? A Google search on just their domain for the ATJ phrase returns over 20,000 results, only 5,000 short of just doing a search for their domain! Crazyness!
Together we must rid the online world of this curse before its too late and aliens will want to avoid contact with us because they've intercepted our wireless network signals and read this phrase a few million times. What, you don't care about aliens and the future of humanity? Well fine then, keep using ATJ then! I suppose I'm just more humble.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to down thirty cups of coffee then check my blood pressure. It's an insurance thing.
