Computing with Microsoft.

 

 

This blog post may be enough to show my ever growing affection with Microsoft technologies. I’m on Windows 7 Ultimate, despite having only 512 MB on my 4 year old desktop, typing with Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 using Windows Live Writer as the blogging client to WordPress.

 

And the picture above was captured from a Microsoft webcam as well. I probably should have studied the webcam specification because I’m not quite satisfied with the quality. Those aren’t my eye brows. Anyway, if anyone has suggestion of a good webcam, please note me.

 

Normally I don’t quite like to work with third party applications, in this case, using Windows Live Writer as the client to WordPress, but so far it’s good. Hopefully it may help me to be more productive with my blog.

 

Blogging may well be fun again

I want to see Woods on the green!

So the news has it that Accenture had dropped Tiger Woods as their representative, while Tag Heuer retained. I would think that these decisions were taken with business consideration in mind instead of morality stance.

Personally, I dont care about his private life at all. This may sound ironic, as I’m about to write my concern about media obsession with his recently uncovered extramarital affairs. But my concern is only that all this is causing Tiger to take an indefinite leave from golf.

I’m not a fan of golf. But I’m a fan of geniuses. Tiger qualifies as one of the best geniuses who register most success in their sports career. Others in mind being Roger Federer, and I am a fan of these two. I play neither golf nor tennis, but their achievement of total success are inspiration to me in many ways. The fact that Tiger had extramarital affairs did not trouble me, because I never saw him as morality spokesperson anyway.

I just hope the media frenzy over this matter will be over soon. Or better, for Tiger Woods to still be back on golf course doing his usual best despite every negative whisper around him. I hope it’s the latter, although I might be expective too much. ( Cristiano Ronaldo comes to mind, when he gave his superb performance despite being booed during 2006 World Cup against France. If Tiger could do that … ).

Yeay , Master’s degree in Computer Science

I’m happy. I finally got a degree in Computer Science, a Master’s degree to be exact. I dont know why, but my interest in Computer Science is super high. Personally, I think it is really nice to receive acknowledgement of competency in something that you are obsessed about.

When I was doing my 4-year MEng in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE), I was occasionally overwhelmed with frustration for not doing Computer Science instead. I guess now it has all turned out alright. I can’t really do comparison between MEng and M.Sc. as one was done full-time and another part time. The experience was also very different as one was done in the UK and another locally.

The breakdown of Information Security course in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) is the following:

First Semester

Telecommunication, Network and Internet Security
Application Development Security
Introduction Cryptography
Seminar / Special Topics

Second Semester

Information System Security
Law, Investigation and Ethics
Operational and Physical Security

Third Semester

Research Methodology
Project 1
Security Architecture and Models
IT Project Management

Fourth Semester

Project II
Global Issues

2010 Wishlist

So a good friend of mine had come up with his 2010 wishlist. I am coming up with mine here, and rather naturally, it would be highly centric towards gaining and improving computer technical skills.

Regarding Go, I have learnt not to overaim. Aiming to improve a few stones at 4d+ level in a year, is absurd. At least of me, it is. Some Hong Kong kids might think otherwise (i.e. Kghin). I will place a modest target for this, as my focus is more towards my professional development.

Wishlist for 2010.

1. Study every technical book that I have bought in year 2009 but have not read. This amount to really lot of studying (~20,000 pages)
2. Write and publish 4 technical articles a month
3. Earn CCNA and CCNP certification.
4. Launch personal website.
5. Be a “real” 5d in Go. Not just barely having a non-active 5d account.
6. Represent Malaysia in three oversea Go tournaments, with one at least a major tournament
7. Practise healthy lifestyle (still thinking on the details. Have to really follow this time)
8. Be stylish. Lose nerd and hardwork image. People dont have to know much I work on anything. They just have to see my output. (a little hypocritical, but seems needed in professional and corporate daily work)
9. Be involved in one active open source project. Level of involvement could be minimal i.e. observing and following progress track).

Maybe that’s enough. I think I could work very hard next year, but I want to channel the extra effort into the quality aspect of above targets..

Reorganization

The management had transferred my ownership of desktop PC to a new employee from Order Processing. Now I only have my laptop, like every other consultant here. This suits our job nature better, as we should often be on the move. But it saddens me a bit to have lost my desktop PC, which I had been using for various dirty programming work.

Perhaps that’s a way for the management to get me focus on my real work, rather than doing unnecessary programming

Now that my desk is less cluttered, I think it is the right time to do plenty of transformation altogether. I dont really subscribe to “less is more” principle. Obviously more is more and less is less (outside the box thinking aint always right). I simply need to do better personal management.

Regarding this blog, I am going to scour through previous post, and uploaded contents and remove stupid stuff that I wrote. I know there are plenty in here. I will try harder to keep stupidity to myself from now on.

I just want to have a good blog.

Before the year ends ..

It’s already the beginning of an end. It’s the first day of the last month in 2009. Despite my very selfish way of life, I still had moments of joy, despair, frustrations, pride, regret. Plain life, like a pendulum swinging between good and evil, between success and failure.

Retrospectively, I dont think I have achieved much this year. Regarding Go, I am glad that I managed to get 4 wins in both Nanning International and KPMC tournament. Also, I managed to create a new (secret) account on KGS and maintain it at 5d, although ‘idazuwaika’ and ’sensemaker’ account (which are more representative of my current strength) are still at 4d. Those achievements however fall short of my resolve during the beginning of the year. Overall, I am neutral about my Go. The pendulum aint swinging between emotions or perceptions, save for a minor, occasional vibration.

Health .. ! Sad to say, it’s progressively going backward. During the desperation times of managing my thesis, I had successfully gained few kilos. I dont feel good looking at the mirror nowadays. I also consumed large amount of caffeine, sugar and snacks. Of course, I dream of being a hard-core programmer, but living on soda and snacks like one was not part of it. Haizz.. gonna take a lot of effort to reverse the damage.

Knowledge acquisition .. ! I am kind of pleased to have gained a substantial understanding of Trusted Computing technology, due to my research on its application in Internet Voting. And along with it, I had familiarised myself with Qt C++ GUI framework during the project development for demonstration. I had wonderful moment using Qt Creator and Qt libraries. They allowed me to focus on my project without too much overhead.

Skill acquisition for this year is zero. Or negative to be exact, if I take into account of my degrading memory of Mandarin Chinese. At one time, I also managed to memorize katakana and hiragana of Japanese writing system, but now they are gone too. I am embarrassed being reminded of my super failure in this part.

There’s only one month left before the end of year. I dont think I have the energy to go at any more personal goals. I rather prepare myself with knowledge and skills to make 2010 a better year.

Work, PhD, Freelancer, Startup ?

I feel bad for my blog. It used to be quite active, with me writing my life in hope to share my thoughts with others besides being a personal journal that I can revisit to judge whether my life is interesting or not. But lately, I have been too busy with my Master thesis and consequently had to abandon this blog.

I did not expect my project to be very challenging. Conceptually, it was easy enough. I wanted to study the capabilities of Trusted Computing and then use them to tackle problems inherent to Internet Voting. But it turned out there were too many suprises. Configuring tpm-emulator 0.61 from Mario Strasser, and TrouSerS took weeks, since I was not familiar with Linux. I also had to modify and recompile tpm-tools to make some of their options work.

Also, during the course of my project, I probably have read and reread “A Practical Guide to Trusted Computing” for about 6 times, and funnily I enjoyed gaining new understanding every time. Oh I’m so geeky

So .. what’s next for me?

Should I be focusing on my work, achieving top performance and patiently climb the corporate ladder?

Should I ride on current momentum, and do a PhD part-time?

Should I be gaining new working experience as freelancer and putting myself into different problem domains?

Should I create an idea, rigorously work to implement it, and launch a startup?

Honestly, I am not sure of what my decision will be. Right now, desire is burning in me to just implement everything I have studied and read. I have some ideas, but revealing them now would be premature.

Post KPMC

4th Korea Prime Minister Cup (KPMC) ended last Monday, with me getting 4 wins from a total of 7 matches, which is actually pretty much the standard achievement for Malaysia. I was ranked at 29th out of a total 68 participants, a slight improvement from last year where Malaysia was placed 35th, although Alex who was then the representative, also had won 4 games.

In turned out that I was not the only one who felt uncomfortable with the speedy tournament. Other players from further countries like Europe, North/South America were even worsely affected than me. So, I guess all my rantings in the previous post didn’t really hold much water.

I’m not going to say much here. I just hope that I can continually win local selection tournaments and qualify for more international tournaments. 2010 will be an interesting year, with plenty of oversea tournaments to aim for, including World Amateur Go Championship (WAGC), Korean Prime Minister Cup (KPMC), Asian Games, and other smaller tournaments.

More pictures and reports available from Malaysia Weiqi Association website.

Tough time KPMC

I know I have not updated this blog for very long. For the past one month, I have been out of control of my own life. I got involved with a lot of people in many activities, and as such, I had trouble keeping my usual routine. I did not blog, study, play Go etc.

The fact that I have started focusing more on my work instead of side activities was the major factor.

Tomorrow, I will leave for Jeonju, Korea to attend the Prime Minister Cup (KPMC). It is one of the major international amateur Go tournaments, the other prominent one being World Amateur Go Championship (WAGC) which I attended in 2008.

Honestly, I still have not recovered from the trauma of performing very badly in previous WAGC. I got 46th place. So large was the number, it was even larger than the answer to the universe. That time, I could still forgive myself for being the nervous newbie to competitive tournaments.

I was quite looking forward to KPMC tournament until I saw the schedule below.

3 matches on Saturday, 4 on Sunday? Are you kidding me? I cannot play more that two matches per day! I almost fell sick during SEA Games 2007 after playing three matches on the first day. Had to rest myself at the massage and therapy centre.

Way long before that when I attended Malaysia Chess Championship, I vomited after playing three matches on the first day. I suppose I’m just not cut out to bear intense pressure from tournament. I’m not a mind sport athlete, just a hobbyist.

Scary.. presenting on 7th Oct.

Dear all,

Please find the attached file as the latest Infosec Project 2 Presentation schedule. The involve dates for the presentation are 5th, 6th and 7th October 2009.

Please note that the report should be prepared for 3 copies and must be submitted to CASE at least 3 days before presentation day.

Thank you and all the best.

Wohoooo…. I really cant rest. What will Raya mean to me this year? Huhu..