OpenOffice Has A New Version

Cuppa has been busy with work and life (as usual).

In absence of any earth-shaking news, I present this rather mundane announcement:

OpenOffice 2.4 is out!

I said this news is mundane because most people probably knew it way before this.

After a few days of use, the most obvious thing is the loading speed has improved, and this makes it even more pleasant to use on a day-to-day basis.

There are still some gaps between it and M$ office, but in view of the M$ price tag and my usage, OpenOffice is just good enough for me in a practical way, never mind the free speech, open specs kind of ideologies.

Some Random Notes

Today I woke up unusually early (5a.m, to be exact). After sitting in front of the computer for sometime, I made a call to continue my I-want-to-talk campaign. After that, I went to McD for breakfast. The coffee is good there. :)

I was back home around 7:15. Still early, I took this opportunity to tidy up my system by deleting some unused files, defragmented the hard drive, and downloaded windows defender. The last item I don't feel is too useful, but to be a bit paranoid, I installed it anyway.

There were some pictures I took the last few weeks, and I posted them here in no particular orders, as a pseudo-diary of myself I guess.

Farewell lunch for my colleague. He went to a greener pasture. This photo was taken by shaky hands of Cuppa

My company has recently had an exodus of engineers and yesterday I found out why: one of the managers was a little bit harsh on his words. Personally I felt okay because so far he has been quite fair and his comments are fact-based. Also his straight-forwardness also grants me equal right to open fire on issues as I see fit. Fair enough :)

Photo-taking-bug bitten Jenny examining her shots

My good old buddy Jenny visited me last week, and delighted I was, I went out to meet up with her. Recounting our old days in secondary school, time really flies and so fast we knew each other for more than 10 years already (and keep counting!!). :D

Recently she is bitten by the travel and photo-taking bug, respectively and came down to Singapore for a visit. While she was busy taking pictures, I just took some test shots using my P1i, which just had a new software upgrade. The effect seemed decent, though it is still weak in low-light scenes. Now my P1i is in a much more usable state compared to the time when I first bought it. Hey, it is after 1 year+ and 2 software upgrades.

Lesson learned: Don't buy hot new gadgets. Wait for at least 1/2 year.

Another shot taken at Clarke Quay. These are amusement facilities "The Reverse Bungie Jump" and "Extreme Swing" (if I remember correctly)

I saw my colleague wearing this T-Shirt during our BBQ party. He bought this from Thailand. Very interesting indeed. ;)

Mommy cat (yellow) and her two kittens

Saw two kittens while on my way home. They were playful and ran around like monkeys. Since they didn't allow me to get close, I could only take a picture from afar.

Differentiated Pricing

When I started to write this post, the initial title was 'Discrimination Charging', but later I realized that sounded too political and had no relationship with what I want to discuss.

I am talking about a product that is priced differently based on geographical region, or even the know-how of the end-users. The former is not uncommon, as the companies wish to position their products for a particular market segment and target consumers.

The example that I can draw will be the prices of ThinkPad by Lenovo (ThinkPad previously was owned by IBM).

In US, a R61 14.1" laptop can be bought at as low as $620. In Singapore, the cheapest model of R61 comes with a whopping price tag of $2112 (S$2957). Though these two models have different specifications and comparing prices isn't exactly fair, the point is Singapore consumers are not given a choice (e.g. 'customize and buy' link is absent from SG site). Personally I disagree with this kind of pricing policy, and sorry, although I love ThinkPad, I won't buy any Lenovo product in the foreseeable future.

Now let's shift to the second part of the topic, on pricing base on the know-how of individual users.

NOTE: The ideas below are not from me. The original article is here. I paraphrase them so that I can refer to the instructions later even if that site is down.

Indeed, there are websites that will let you view the full article if you know what you are doing, or you have to pay $80 per year for subscription.

Here I am talking about viewing the full articles legally, and the website actually silently encourage people to view the articles. Weird? Read on.

To simplify things, I will name an arbitrary site X. This site used to be subscription-based, but this model doesn't really work out because there are just too many alternative sites available. If you want me to pay, I will just go to other thousand of sites which provide similar news for free. Realizing this, site X actually hopes to get page hits so that it can serve ads and get some commissions. In fact, advertisement income is lucrative. It is the major income for google, and when do you see Google charges for anything except the ads?

I mentioned Google? Good, because this is where we are going. Where do most page hits come from? Two types of sources, first is search engines like Google, and the news rating site like Digg. It seems site X lets users referred by these two sources to view the full articles.

With this understanding, we can install a firefox extension that 'spoofs' the referrer URL and make the site X believe we are from the full-article-served sites.

From the surface it seems we are kind of in a gray area because we are faking ('spoofing') something. However in each of the site X articles, there is actually a 'Digg it' or similar links. In other words, anybody can read those articles by clicking the corresponding link in digg.com. What we are doing is just making a short-cut, instead of the usual digg.com => siteX.com route.

To start, you need to have firefox.

Next, download and install the refspoof extension. By using this extension, you can modify your referral source.

After you have refspoof up and running, there will be a 'R' at the right hand side and a new tool bar. At the 'spoof:' bar, type digg.com, and click on 'R' and choose 'static referrer'. From now on, all websites you visit will think you are from digg.com.

Just for record, other firefox extensions I am using:

All-in-One Sidebar
DownThemAll!
Google Browser Sync
refspoof
Snap Links

All the above I found are very useful. Try them.

The Good of Insufficiency

Today is holiday and Cuppa is glad to have a day off to clear off his laundry.

While hanging the clothes, I faced a problem. I didn't have enough cloth-clamps for the load of laundry I had. Since my washed laundry is left dry outdoor under the sun on bamboo poles, this posed a problem for me. The clothes would be blown away by wind in no-time without those clamps.

The first reaction was responsive and logical: go and buy some more clamps. However my laziness to walk forced me to rethink how I usually hung my clothes. After some thoughts, I found out a number of clothes don't need to be clamped if I arrange them in a more clever way. Hence after this 'crisis', I actually can make do with less clamps than I thought!

A step back on this problem will open up a whole new horizon:

Do we really need so much of X, for X = {time, money, shoes, hi-fi's, or any measurable stuff} ? Try to give yourself less, and see how your creative flares.

The oil crisis we are having now, though abhorred by many people who own cars, does serve the same purpose: it gives everybody an incentive to stop and rethink what have been doing so far. Most of the time, brain's inertia to think will just make us do things repetitively without questioning the said efficiency and effectiveness.

Do you really need to drive to the gym which is 2 miles away, hop on the treadmill to run 4 miles, and drive back?

Do you really need to have a car as big as elephant and one gallon of gas can only move it barely out of the garage?

An inconvenience on hand, coupled with laziness, is a golden opportunity for us to improve.

The M-shape Society

Today, 'M' is my topic. However, for those too obsessed with brands and poisoned beyond repair by commercials and corporate marketings, this M has NOTHING to do with Motorola, Mc Donald's, or M-&-M.

The M-Shape Society is a hypothesis that describes wealth is and will be distributed in our society in an M-shape way. It predicts our society will be bi-polar in terms of individual net-worth: people are divided into two mutually exclusive camps of the very poor, and the super rich. Middle-class people will slowly extinct by being swept to either side of the M, as shown below. In other words, people who have the required attitude and knowledge will be obscenely rich, while those who don't slowly precipitate to the bottom and stay there. (There is even a measure for income inequality: The Gini Coefficient. In an M-Shape society, Gini coefficient will be relatively high and close to 1.0)

The consequence is dire for everybody, because we may see most of the wealth held by a handful of individuals, while a lot of people are struggling under the poverty line, where everyday is a battle for survival.

Society with no middle class

This hypothesis is first proposed by Kenichi Ohmae, a renown management strategist.

Does this hypothesis hold water? How do we prove, or disprove it?

To start, let's frame our question like this: The society is becoming M-Shape

Since I am kind of convinced it is true, so I will just try to prove it head-on. If it doesn't work out, a contradiction will be generated, and we could prove it by contradiction.

Here I need to remind myself not to take an example as a proof (e.g. "Cuppa is poor, ergo life is not fair and the society is M-shape."). Can we take the GDP or average income of a particular country and start from there? Nope, because the income disparities will be canceled out and averaged.

How about this: Some governments will release data on household income, and it is a good starting point. Do note absolute numbers usually mean nothing, we need to note the trend, the nascent trails....

What can we say about Singapore?

After some search on the net, I got statistics for year 1990, 2000, and 2007. The graph is plotted as follows:

This graph, plotted with OpenOffice Calc, is interesting.

Until here, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed, because the statistics doesn't tell all the stories. In fact, this is just the annual household salary income from work, and it doesn't take into account the return from investments from stock markets, forex, or real-estates. If we can get statistics from other countries, it will be helpful.

Back to the graph. There are radical jumps for incomes more than 10K over the 2 decades. While the lower-income groups actually decrease in percentage, note also the increase in middle-income groups is much more moderate. All these do get along with our hypothesis, because it shows the rich is getting even richer faster, but I don't feel we have a solid case on hand to prove the hypothesis beyond doubt. It will take Cuppa some more time to observe and sleep on this.

Final observation is out of the topic, but I still want to say: OpenOffice is every bit as usable as Excel and it is free (free, as both in free beer, and in free speech). Use it.

Random Notes

On Malaysia:
When I logged on to Live Messenger, my friend sent me a note about racial injustice in Malaysia.

I read the first few items, shook my head, and ignore the rest. Why bother?

On Relationship:
There is a new girl in my office, she just graduated from polytechnic and is young and vibrant. When she told me she is only 20, my mind wandered back to Purdue. Back to year 2000 when she was also 20 then. All the scenes raced back to my mind. I could still remember we talked outside MSEE, under the tree at Grissom Hall, walking beside Porter while she was eating a cup of Yogurt... Those deeply buried memories mounted another round of foray when I was least prepared. Maybe it is true the more you care about somebody, the less that person will appreciate.

This reminds of a famous saying by Bob Hope "bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it". Think about it. Rings true beyond banks.

On Future Prospects:
The engineering jobs are going into a decline world-wide. I think a soul-searching is imminent to see if I want to stay on. For now, I still see no reason to do something that I don't completely enjoy. Working a 60-hour-week is not something I will appreciate if I don't like the job.

I have so many variables on the table: my parents, myself, my career, world peace, etc.

You may ask how does the family value that I mentioned earlier fit into the picture. I don't know......

Politics?

The dust from Malaysia's general election is relatively settled. However I didn't really give it any coverage in my blog until now. Mainly I don't know what to say.

Even though the overwhelming victory of the opposition parties is a turn to the better, the incompetent, corrupted, and rotten bureaucracies that grow over the years die hard. It is an uphill battle for the new government to flush all the jerks and shake up the system.

Ok, enough politics. Now something softer...

A Few Thousand Of Words

Here are a few pictures I took these past few weeks, gotta save them before the software upgrade of my phone wipes them out.

I went to take a walk around Buano Vista and the area is serene and high tech. I visited the Biopolis where most of the bio-technology companies in Singapore are located.

Taken at the BioPolis at Buano Vista. This is some kind of DNA (I think)

Flower in one of the ponds in Biopolis

Now the camera moves to Mr. Snail's room. He has bought a BIG LCD screen (22" inch Samsung) and a BIG computer (Core 2 duo 2.6GHz) , plus a BIG graphics card (NVidia 8800GT). Here we see him in action.

Mr. Snail gets creamed by the computer AI. :P

However, the more scary part is he claimed he got some special weapon in Supreme Commander After he showed the 'secret weapon' indeed has a shell as hard as a tortoise's and a few pretty destructive ion cannons, I am worried.

Can Cuppa survive and fight to his glory. Can the evil Snail prevails? We shall see very soon.

P1i Update Service Fiasco

I encountered some issue while trying to run the Sony Ericsson Upgrade Service (SEUS) program for my P1i.

The error message is as cryptic as ever, and the programmer is extremely strong a candidate to get the 'idiotic programmer of the year' award for the very informative message:

"Incompatible Macromedia version. Required verision available from http://www.macromedia.com. Application will terminate"

Macromedia is (should be 'was', because it is now owned by Adobe) a company name, and there are quite a few products in the Macromedia family. On top of that, what is the 'required' version anyway?

After some search, it turns out the update service requires the Flash Player version 8 or later.

If you are not using Internet Explorer, as most sane programmers do, you are screwed, despite the fact you downloaded and installed the latest flash player. Reason being SEUS only looks at the flash player installed at Internet Explorer, and my IE 7 told me the version it had was version 6. Duh.

Use this link:

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/

Solution is simple: Open the above link with Internet Explorer and upgrade Flash Player accordingly. Even if you did that for firefox/opera/etc., you still gotta do it again for IE. Yeah, stupid, that is the price to pay for using Windoze.

Diary of an 8th-Grader who got C

Dear Diary,

I just took a science test recently, and got a C out of it.

I hate science. I hate maths. Though I love the little MAK who used to sit next to me, but her refusal to pick up the phone really drives me nuts. On top of that, school is a complicated place where adults do things that they never say, and say things that they never do. A few days ago Mr. Gray said we ought not to run in school because it is not a zoo. But in the evening I saw him playing horse riding with Mrs. Graham in the store-room. But isn't horse riding only available in fun-fair or circus or zoo or something?? Adults forever confuse me. Ergo I hate schools also.

I don't understand why I need to remember what is buried deep within the earth's crust or what forms the meteroid. I start to doubt if these people know what google or wikipedia is.

Yours Handsomely,
Cuppa

P/S: Cuppa always got C in science and maths. As a consequence, he grows up as a software engineer who is proficient in C. After experience accrues, his knowledge improves to the stage of C++. B is very near as we shall see.