Exams done :)

Last Saturday, the Last Paper on Physics was finally done! I didn’t, as usual, do well (read: I have never done well), but it was good feeling that I have successfully done it (read: was gracefully defeated).

Some first-time things happened this semester. For the first time, I broke my own record (set in second year) of attending only the very first and last lecture of a class; this sem, I didn’t attend ANY lecture of two classes. Some friends asked me how I managed to take 6 classes and Honor thesis plus teaching two classes, and this is my answer then; I took classes but I just did my own independent study (read: I studied only when I felt like it or only when it’s ABSOLUTELY necessary). Another thing is I took this semester’s exams in a pen! I have almost never taken an exam in a pen, always opting for a pencil and an eraser (that’s the best protection against writing stupid things on the paper). Thanks to the Religion module exam, the pen finally came to a conclusion of its life: a casualty! LOL! Still another thing…it’s not really a very first time…I became extraordinarily calm in the reading week and exam week. Not that I got too panic and uneasy in the past, just that this sem, I felt like I have never gone through exams as peacefully as I have this time. =D Because I don’t care anymore? LOL! Well…there are some other first-time stuffs but I don’t wanna display my shames and stupidities on public. ;)

After the exam, I thought I would have felt strange or weird or nostalgic. But, it turns out I didn’t feel anything although I did realize that I was something different from then on. Instead, I went to Bugis and walked around randomly, dropping by any shop that took my fancy and ended up buying some stuffs I was not sure I would need later (luckily the heavy rain stopped when I got to Bugis!).

I thought I would like feel some sort of liberation too, but I didn’t (and it wasn’t a surprise anyway) probably because I have been feeling liberation from studies for…like half the semester!

Anyway, I don’t have much time now to prepare for the project in coming December. I hope I don’t get myself killed in the experiments. Imm ya…I just remember about this totally unrelated stuff I talked about with my mom the other day: I was talking to her about the burning of paper (and paper folded into different shapes) and she told me that people actually had fire-engines standing by in China Town Yangon when it is the season (七月) to burn papers. That reminds me that I should also call the fire department to have a fine engine standby while we are preparing the science experiments in case something exploded in the process. LOL! Argh…whether or not there’s fire-engine, my friends and I still have very little chance surviving…so better not make things explode (my first priority to preserve lives!) =D

Next week, I have yet to go back to school again for teaching; I don’t know what I exactly have to teach, but I hope it’s something I could handle, otherwise…hehe. Students feedback for this sem is not available yet, but I hope it would be positive enough; actually this sem CS1101 class has been the best class; but CS1101C is as usual boring and students are very easily complaining about their scores—even on its final exam day, one student asked me to re-grade his assignment now that he understood what was wrong with the code he submitted; if only we could do that with lecturers!

Okie…time to get the equipment list ready for purchase soon. :)

No more iPhone exclusivity

iPhone 3GS is coming to StarHub and to M1 pretty (how long?) soon. There’ll be no more exclusivity to SingTel :)

And when these phones ship, they will NOT be locked. It turns out that Singapore is the ONLY country that prohibits SIM locking due to anti-competitiveness of doing so! [M1 actually was fined once for accidentally doing so.] But, no SIM locking also means higher OEM prices for the mobile phones (so not at all greatest anyway).

Now who’s gonna win: iPhone or Android?

Too Dry?

Is it just me or is the air getting too dry?

I’m feeling like that for a few days already and that necessitates me to even resort to lotions to sooth the dryness. =X

It’s the same feeling as when North (or North East) wind starts in Burma bringing very little moisture in it, making us use some kind of cream to prevent chapping.

Around you

I was re-reading the Thanksgiving post and was fascinated by “showing Thanks to those around you”.

I wonder how the meaning of “around you” has changed over the years. Especially how it was “revolutionized” by the advent of the Internet and the WWW. “Those around us” are no longer restricted to those physically around us…there are so many people living in different parts of the globe and yet are still around us.

I am really thankful to the computer scientists at ARPA (or were there any other involved?) for the invention of the Internet and to the physicist at CERN for the creation (though creation sounds religious) of the WWW. They have really changed our life in more positive ways than they have negatively. Though I personally would not like the idea of having a casual conversation with a serious scientist (and I don’t think I have what it takes to become a scientist to), I am greatly thankful and indebted to them for giving me a 20-inch window through which I can see and hear and read about and connect with the whole world.

And of course, the importance of Google in our life couldn’t be stressed more! If the computer scientists and physicists built the roads and highways, Google helped us by putting the directions and sign boards all over these roads, without which we would be just as lost on the Internet as a kid in a strange neighborhood.

(Well…that would have made a technology Thanksgiving toast too LOL!)

[By the way, I have always thought that the WWW was created by the computer scientists, and I rejected the idea when Dan Brown claimed it in Angels and Demons. Only recently did I come to realize that it was indeed developed by the physicists at CERN—the place where the LHC collider is now running again possibly to make anti-matter? Perhaps a decade later, they would probably come up with some strong energy source that can replace fossil fuels to power our houses and factories?]

Black Friday

It’s the day after Thanksgiving when retails start to make profits (or so they say).

It’s not called Black Friday not coz it’s “dark” in a sense of bad things. It’s coming from the accounting practice of showing positive figures in black and negative ones in bracketed red. So, that basically means the Friday after Thanksgiving is the day when retails start to pocket lots of revenue; it’s also the start of the X’mas holiday shopping season. So, it’s a big day for retails, marked by so many not-so-real-discount-if-you-look-carefully discounts and consumers’ impulse buys coz of the big figure discounts (and followed by a long queue of returns).

Anyway, who would have resisted when a $70 keyboard is sold at $19 for the 24 hours only? I think my sis and her friends are gonna queue at, like, 5AM (last year they did at like 3AM). That’s a hell of a queuing time! I don’t think I would go queue like that just for the discounts (that are most probably coming again throughout the holiday season anyway).

Oh ya…Eindra Kyaw Zin is in San Francisco now and she will also be joining the eager shoppers on Black Friday. Hope she gets great deals to bring back to Burma! :)

On a related note, I think Singapore should have a day like that (a day which is not a national holiday but when a lot of people take a day off from work and go shopping for great deals). The Great Singapore Sale is great, but it doesn’t create enough fervor, I guess. And I don’t understand the Late Night Shopping at Orchard. What does it mean if the shops are closed by 10PM and we are just strolling around the area at late night (and possibly be at a movie theatre)? Or do some shops actually open till late night (in which case I’m just ignorant!!!)?

Australian PM on Climate Change Summit

Just watched the interview and I think the points he made are nice and cogent.

By the way, he mentioned also 7000-page treaty. What? 7000 page? How can people finish reading it in their entire life? Plus it's not even a story book! :x

Michelle Obama Offensive Picture

I have been reading news regarding Google Image results showing an offensive picture of Michelle Obama at #1 position. I was unfortunate enough or Michelle was lucky enough; I was never able to find the picture.

Just now I changed the query and found this image at this website. I have intentionally made the picture very small down to 100px. That’s too offensive to a person to turn him/her into a monkey face.

Google explain the result and gave their apology at this page too (that appears as an advertisement link, meaning Google bought their own AdWords—own money going into own pockets).

Not that I am too eager to share her offensive picture. Just in case there was anyone who was as unfortunate as me and was curious to know what it was (and why it was so much of a media hype these days).

PS: I think the picture does not matter that much; that it appeared as #1 result did matter much. On another account, I found this altered picture of Barack Obama too.  

Not surprisingly, it was found on this page, presumably an Iranian webpage written in a language I have absolutely no idea of. [The server itself is located in the US though.]

Brad and Angelina

Just another piece of news that the couple gave out almost USD7 million to charity. That means they must have earned at least two times (or perhaps ten times?) that amount! Anyway, I’m glad that they did; even if they did it for tax benefits, it’s still a win—win for everyone involved. (:

By the way, there’s gonna be a new movie Salt next year featuring Jolie. Again she’s gonna be like invincible female hero, but I would still wanna watch it. =) Trailer below:

Salt Trailer [Leaked?]

SMSes from 9/11

It’s been a few days I have lost touch with news. Just saw this news article on CNN: Web site posts what it says are half million text messages from 9/11. That made me wanna read the rest of the story after the summary.

There I saw some of the messages people sent before their last moments. Normally I would just share the story on Facebook directly, but I wanted to take snapshots of those SMSes, so I created this post to preserve them. Just this evening I was thinking on the train on my way back from NUS, what I would do if there were an accident and that would leave me only a few minutes to live on; I would try to get to Facebook from my phone (yeah, now they have this little application which I almost never have used although I installed that) and say a last goodbye to my friends and a final “I Love You” to them and to the four people I love most in my life. =) [LOL! This is TOO apocalyptical! Keep it out of my mind!!!!]

Anyway, as much heart-felt as these SMSes from 9/11 make me feel, I couldn’t but feel uncomfortable at the idea that our SMSes are cached somewhere along the way! I met a friend who was so cynical of Gmail that she deletes almost every email she received there, claiming that Google reads her email to show advertisement. I wonder what she would respond to this idea that her SMSes (and possibly her voice calls) are stored for archival purpose somewhere on Earth! That sends me a chill down the spine!

Thanksgiving :)

 

It’s a secular holiday, meaning it’s not a celebration tied to any religion, although its root could be traced back to giving Thanks to Christian God by the early pilgrims.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone (even those who do not celebrate it). It’s a day to show your thankfulness and care to those around you (although it would be a shame if we only did that on this particular day of the year—one out of 365!).

Anyway, something is always better than absolute zero. So, Happy Thanksgiving to you all again and have a great time having and giving, and receiving and [showing] thanks and care! [I tried to copy Joey but I forgot exactly what he said, but it was really funny!]

E-Reader vs Paper

Just saw a guy reading on Amazon Kindle. First time seeing it so close. Actually the screen is REALLY nice for reading; really good the eyes (yeah…I put emphasis on eyes a lot coz I don’t enjoy good eyes).

Well this is not about Kindle. It just made me think about if an e-reader would replace books some time in the future. I asked myself.

The advantage of an e-reader is it can hold a lot of books in a small storage card; it can search the book and quickly get to the place I am interested (traditional index is not good enough).

But, on the other hand, I only have one screen for an e-reader, but I can have several for a paper book! I can insert my fingers between pages and flip between them to and fro (to compare figures or to compare two tables?); try doing that on an e-book! Also, a paper book doesn’t run out of batter while I’m reading! It’s true that I can’t carry so many books with me at the same time like I could with an e-reader, but who needs 100 books at any time anyway?

Yes, both are vulnerable to rain (and water), but I could still rescue my paper book and read it; but chances are almost zero if an e-reader gets wet!

I’m not so much into using paper, but it’s simply better than an e-reader. The experience of reading a novel on a paperback and on PDF reader is different: there is this feeling of papers turning and the bulk moving from the right-hand side to the left-hand side as we progress into the story  and there is also touch and smell of a book! On an e-reader, none—absolutely none—of them are there!

I don’t think I am ready to adopt the concept of reading on an e-reader yet. For text-only novels, I would read them on an e-reader not because I don’t care about the sensation that a paper book offers but because I could increase the font size (again for my eyes).

Earbud Wrapping Technique [Video Tutorial]

This is a really good technique to wrap earbud! Not just for that, can also use for other types of cords too.

Very very easy to follow and really good technique!

Browser Lure

Oops…while I was searching on Google and opening links in the background, suddenly, the whole browser was gone and left was the message box that says something stupid:

Actually, the browser was resized to its smallest possible size (I think JavaScript resizing) and the stupid guy at the site move the browser to the center so that it is completely covered by the message box, giving me the illusion that my browser was gone.
Just click OK and I was taken to another page:

Scanning and scanning…wow…so many porn found. LOL! I had to blur the images coz they are TOO graphic. I wonder if there is a system that can scan the computer for porn files; how would one do that?
Then, the prompt for download kept appearing again and again…till I agree to download (and delete it).
Using Google Chrome, the bastard at the site couldn’t get the browser to resize, so it wasn’t so realistic.
Anyway, he should realize that I am using Windows 7. Showing me Windows XP is outright stupid. Bluffing me there were porn files was even funnier; who would want to delete them right away?
That’s a tale of a stupid browser trick. I don’t know what people call this kind of stupid lure. Definitely it’s not an attack—far from it.
PS: If you would like to see it in action, here is the link. But do this only if you are sure you want to see coz (as I warn) the graphics are too graphic. If you are both scared and curious, try the link in Google Chrome. I found that it couldn't do anything there.

Hurry Up?

Why should I hurry up in the first place? It’s just a system to view bills online and it’s not gonna give me anything anyway. I’m already viewing my bills online (but still I’m receiving paper envelopes).

I don’t think viewing bills online is good enough. I’m still gonna print the barcode page so that I can easily pay my bill at the machine. Why not have an online payment system? Then I simply don’t need to print anything at all. I can’t be asked to remember the account number and the amount every time I pay the bill though; having to check if I typed the correct account number at the machine is a very nervous process, especially I can’t find information on what will happen if I paid to the wrong account.

Well…anyway…this is not about the system that they are advertising. This is about (subjectively) how stupid the advertisement is! The content of the email also gives me so compelling a reason to HURRY UP and sign up for the system!

Funny (or Unfortunate) Greeting

I was on my way home on the bus after the exam. Just before getting off, I met this guy—this guy who Thet Lin Thu told me sat in the library for three hours doing nothing but just smiling alone.

He was looking at me and I couldn’t help but start to laugh (though I tried to contain it in time!) when I looked at his face for, like 5 seconds. Then he thought I was greeting him and he greeted me back. I don’t know how to say how much I wanted to laugh out loud and how hard it was to contain it on the bus.

I hope he didn’t notice that. Chances are that he won’t too. LOL!

When Google Suggest Goes Wrong

Saw this post from a friend of mine at his twitter.

I was able to reproduce it. LOL!

I can skip dinner now! :x

Non-Disclosure Agreement

I didn’t know that it was an early program involving non-disclosure agreement. I just thought it was just a random invitation to participate in a program.

Just read the document and found that it was under non-disclosure agreement. LOL! Lucky that I didn’t blurt out anything about it. It’s Microsoft Confidential (I don’t know what’s so confidential about it) :x [But what’s gonna happen if someone talks about it? Not that I’m so tempted to do so especially when I’m not allowed to, but I just wanna know what’s gonna happen.]

One more reason…

One more reason why ManU should win the title this season.

I just realized that Owen has never won Premier League in his career! He has always been with Liverpool (and Newcastle) but neither of them are good enough to hold the trophy for…two decades? or even more!

Now that he’s with the Red Devils, he should grab this chance to add EPL medal to his collection!

(By the way, he looks older then the Owen I used to know :x )

Ref: ManUtd.com [Again, this is not a reference =D ]

HTC Hero [Sprint]

Click on image for larger view

How come this HTC Hero from Sprint is SO MARKEDLY different from the mainstream HTC Hero phones out there? Or do they make different phones under the same name for different operators?

Saved from embarrassment

I was just now studying Finance and realized that there was no lecture in week13.

In fact I was thinking of attending the last lecture as I have already skipped three classes for this module. Lucky was I that I didn’t go to the class in week13!

Otherwise I’ll be the only person in the LT (I don’t remember which LT but it’s in BIZ and I only know how to go there). =D

Buy Back Asia

Is the school sharing the class rosters with third-parties like Buy Back Asia?

Google Voice --> VoIP –> UDP --> Congestion?

Google Voice bought Gizmo5 recently to better provide VoIP on cell phones using the phone data plans?

VoIP, as far as my limited knowledge tells me, uses UDP as transport protocol (or so I have heard of in so many network classes). So far, people use VoIP on the computers through Skype, Google Talk and etc.

But, if Google starts to publicize Google Voice VoIP offerings and if it ever gets to wide-spread use, would there be a surge of UDP packets on the internet?

So far, as far as I was told, only TCP implements flow and congestion control and many internet gateways also only implements Drop Tail and RED. TCP responds to these gateways algo by adjusting their windows, but UDP, no matter how many packets are being dropped either by Drop Tail or RED, is insensitive of the congestion, but will keep pumping packets into the pipe (or the connection).

If a lot of people start to talk on Google Voice using VoIP coz it’s cheap and FREE (possibly even for international calls), wouldn’t it create a chaos of UDP traffics that would cause congestions and possibly disrupt the TCP flows used by other applications such as the Web?

I’m just thinking…not that I know anything more about this than a second year COM student who has taken cs2105 course…so I may be making myself a total fool by saying all these. If so, just take it as some hallucination caused by the exam fright. =D

Rebooting cell phones?

Now that cell phones are more and more like mini-computers—Android based on Linux kernel, iPhone OS—will they benefit from occasional (and intentional) reboots?

I’m not asking a questions I already know the answer of. I really wanna know.

For one thing, I remember, from my very early experience with Android in its alpha stage, Android would kill processes automatically if it’s running out of memory and applications are explicitly asked to handle this “force kill” in the life cycle (like by saving the program state so that it can resume later as if the application was never killed). But, how well does and can Android do that so-called automatic memory management?

Prof vs Student

Yeah…took this from a friend of mine. That seems like a universal problem with professors. :x

They have been students themselves and they would certainly have had experience of doing a balancing act among the plethora of classes and readings. Are they not considerate enough?

Is it more like a problem caused by humans’ inability or refusal to put themselves in others’ shoes even if they have had vivid experience of what things are like on the other side?

Bertatov :)

So bored with studies. Went to ManU.com and there it is…I saw the news that Demitar scored twice to get a total of 48 goals for his country team! By that he broke the record of 47 goals held for 30 years! Woo!!!

I hope he will come back to OT to keep scoring more and more…I really love his skills (that’s really really great), attacks and acrobatic strikes. Just that I think he needs more speed and aggression on the pitch.

Ref: ManUtd.com [LOL! It’s not really a reference, but I don’t know what to write for the link. =D ]

Quote: Progress

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.—Samuel Butler

El Condor Pasa

El Condor Pasa :)

This is just for my own archive. =D

If the images in the video are indeed Peru, then I should add it to my list of travel destinations (possibly after my retirement)! :)

Quote: Courage

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.—Mark Twain

New Google Translate

Just saw the announcement that Google Translate now translates as I’m typing. I don’t care so much about this tool, unless I see friends using unrecognizable language to update their Facebook status. Even then, real-time translation doesn’t matter anything to me.

Below is nothing related to the new feature. I just went there to play and was pleased to find that it can handle LOL to translate. =D

Reliability of @comp.nus.edu.sg

I sent my FYP slides to my supervisor and my PhD friend. He looked through the slides and sent me feedback, I guess, right away.

The email arrived just now. More than 24 hours past the final presentation.

This is not the first time comp.nus.edu.sg mail server has failed. An earlier email was also delivered 4 days later and yet even earlier emails that I sent to myself were delivered weeks later.

If the email contained instructions for critical tasks or a warning about an impending threat, I would have been dead meat. :x

Computing mail servers obviously need an overhaul! This is not even talking about its 1990-style web mail interface!

CS1101C

It’s disheartening to see such an answer at the end of the semester. The student declared so many functions (or were they there in the skeleton flie?) and just a return 0; is all he/she wrote? :x

An exciting morning

It was an exciting morning today. I was more excited coz I watched 2012 last night and didn’t practice the presentation at all before going to bed. LOL!

So, it was like I did a full practice run on the train while traveling to school. Kind of like mental practice. =D But, it worked.

Then I was the second person to arrive at the meeting room. Shreyasee (a Research Fellow from Duke-NUS who will be taking over my project) was there quite early too. I was glad to see her and Jun Ping in the audience.

But, it wasn’t just these two. I don’t know how some people got free time in the reading week to come to school just to listen to the FYP presentations! Even I don’t plan to stay after I finish my presentation (luckily, mine was the very first one, so I can sneak out early). They plan to sit there for the whole session. OMG!

The bigger the audience, the more nervous I became of course! =S

When the time comes, an irony happened; the one where questions were least expected from kept asking questions and some of them I really had a hard time answering; the one from whom plenty of questions were expected coz he was the one working in the same field only asked one question and was done with it. What an irony!

Then I had breakfast and went off to cheer up Cryonox for his presentation. Guess what? He was late for his presentation! Tan Tiow Seng was one of his evaluators. He saw me coming in and said “I am leaving. The student never come. I’m gonna fail him.” I know he was kidding; we always see in CS1101 meetings. Then shortly after, Cryonox turned up. Luckily his other evaluator was even later than him, getting stuck in the wrong room. LOL!

While waiting for Jack (his other evaluator), TTS said, “Zaw Lin, your FYP title is very interesting!” Cryonox was pleasingly happy to hear that. TTS was making a sarcasm! The title Cryonox typed in his final report was Zaw Lin HYP report. OMG! That gave me a pleasant surprise! That was his title? LOL!!! He must be kidding!

Okie…that was the day of FYP presentation. Uneventful (which is a good thing). Nothing spectacular as well. Just an ordinary visit to school and that was it! The Last Presentation.

PS: Oh yeah…they took photos while we were presenting. That gave some shocks to my knees for a minute. :x

Quote: Expert

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.—Neils Bohr

Untitled

Acknowledgement

I think the first step is the most important one in many things we do.

And I think I have been fortunate enough to have met with Aaron Tan in my very first programming course in NUS—CS1101X. There were three classes for CS1101—X, Y and Z. X was for those who had previous programming experience and Y and Z were for those who didn’t. I don’t remember what prompted me to pick X although when I first embarked on a CS module, I was trembling like a child getting to the swimming pool on his first day of swimming lesson. I had mediocre programming experience in C back in Burma, but I had always had the impression that I was a total nuts when it comes to computing.

But the turning point occurred in CS1101X. It had transformed my life at NUS. It had transformed my interest. It had made my life at NUS a little less miserable. It has transformed me from a relatively computer illiterate who, when he first arrived at NSU, knew nothing about domain-joining and stupidly used the super slow domain account to someone knowledgeable (I don’t claim “very”) in computer science who can now find ways or walk-around to circumvent the “slowness” or the “blocked” and who now could give authoritative suggestions to the non-computer-oriented friends.  And I think it was all because of Mr Aaron Tan.

Were it not because of him, my journey at NUS SoC would have been a different story; were it not because of him, I wouldn’t have discovered my inner strength; were it not because of him, I wouldn’t have embarked on my journey in SoC at all; were it not because of him, I wouldn’t have stood in front of a class giving guidance to the freshman students in programming; were it not because of him, that wouldn’t have happened too and if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have found a better balance and a more meaningful meaning to my life and I wouldn’t have found what I cherish most in my life and what I came to realize would remain the most important thing in our life after taking away all the successes and failures along the life.

For all the good things and the bad things (from which I have learned to grow better) that happened throughout my journey at SoC, I heartily thank Mr Aaron Tan.

[It’s easy to forget the value of those who helped us when we were most in need of help or when we were fledglings struggling for something; especially so when we now have better dreams to realize with the knowledge or whatever we have gained from those obscure and less-well-remembered periods of our life.]

The Way You Make Me Feel - Steps

 

That’s one of my favorite songs by Steps. The video is embed-disabled. =X So I can only link to the YouTube page.

Lie/Truth

Lie: No, I’ll be fine (sob).
Truth: Can I have some attention and sympathy?

One for Sorrow - Steps

Just chanced upon this song in my music library. I never knew that I have this song. I was so surprised when I heard that song while playing the whole library in random. :D

I used to like this song so much and now I still can’t get enough of it. :)
I also remember, in the distant past, I used to like Lisa Scott-Lee so much. Now it seems like from my past life. =D

Oops...Dr Ling

I just checked out the site and found out it was Dr Ling from CS1102 for the coming Monday. LOL!

I remembered when I was taking CS1102, I thought he was just a tutor coz he taught the second half of the course. I didn’t realize he was a lecturer until I saw him in the LT after the mid-term break. Apart from that, I don’t wanna say any more… *chuckle*

Good luck to me :D

Worst thing ever

That’s the biggest insult ever in my life.

There is always a limit when people can stand such outrageous things.

This thing has well passed beyond that point.

It’s affecting my image, and those of any other people involved in this “absolutely unfounded” speculations. It’s affecting the comfort of everyone. It’s affecting something that has lasted for 20 years.

I gotta take some actions to correct this situation.

There is one and only one person who I would let to cross the limit that much. And if that person is reading this, he/she will know who that is.

Bottom line: It has passed the point where I would just stand back and observe. It has affected my moral integrity as a whole. Now, I will take my justice back.

Quote

An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.—John H. Patterson

GDI++ and Google Chrome

I’ve been using GDI++ to do font smoothing on my PC for a long long time. It works with almost all windows but it doesn’t seem to work with Google Chrome; that’s been one reason why I almost never touch Google Chrome to browse web pages.

I just found out a way to enable GDI++ (or make it work) on Google Chrome. In the Google Chrome shortcut, append --no-sandbox to the Target field.

You need to right-click two times to get to Properties to change the shortcut.

If this explanation is as clear as mud, sorry. =D

Anyway, I hope if any of you have this problem, it would be a good fix. I have suffered enough from this problem, so that makes me take 5 minutes to share this.

By the way, the switch added will make Chrome less secure. So… :)

Ref: Google Code

Android Google Contacts Sync

If any of you is using an Android phone and have been annoyed by the phone syncing the phone contacts with ALL Google Contacts in your account, there is a setting that you can change to stop syncing all the alien contacts that Gmail automatically keeps in your Contacts.

If you didn’t know, there are two places in Google Contacts: My Contacts and All Contacts. The latter is where Gmail dumps all the alien email addresses when you reply to a Forward email.

Okie…the setting to change is under People > Groups > Menu > Sync groups. Uncheck Sync all contacts and check only My Contacts and any other groups that you want.

I have no idea if it works but it looks like that’s a big problem for Android phone users and I can sympathize with them coz I was recently cleaning up my Google Contacts (and that’s exactly how I found out about this issue).

Ref: Google Support

Software…

Sometimes I wish I had the super intelligence and superfluous time so that I could write or re-write the applications to make them work the way I want them to and to add new features I wished they had.

That’s not the same as working with a software development company. If I work there, I would be mostly doing the software that people want and adding and dropping features based on the user surveys. I don’t want that.

Hmm…just come to think of it. It would be much better to have someone or some robot to do it for me instead of me getting the time and the brain power to do them myself. Then I can spend my time in a more useful way going out and watching movies. :)

Someone familiar

Just got an email from someone—the name really is SUPER familiar to me.

Took about 5 minutes thinking about it while reading on an article.

Just realized that it is the name of the lecturer of a class I’m taking this semester. Have I been out of class too often?

Something unexpected

Hit hard by something unexpected.

Got no words for it.

Just pure speculations.

I have had no intention or whatsoever. The idea did not cross my mind a wee bit … never before.

Simple until made complicated.

Truth will reveal itself and it will shine by its own light.