(do (clean svbtle) (write hatena))
When I first joined Svbtle as a early user, I was then a young game developer, full of vigor and passion, my motto then was, "Making dreams come true".
Somehow three years later, while my passion for coding and developing did not fade (too much :P), my areas of interest turned from coding games into web development, as was what most people are doing this days during college. I began dabbling in the JavaScript ecosystem and also discovered ClojureScript, in which I fell head-over-heels for but realized it was just too hard to collaborate with others who didn't grok the language, especially when people who grok it are few and in between since it's a LisP.
My other job was freelancing on Fiverr (Shameless plug here.) where I write IT scripts for mostly the Windows domain, unless it's in a cross platform language such as Python.
So I've been writing for quite some time on Svbtle until I went onto hiatus during the first year of university where I wrote on Hatena instead. Until now I still didn't really quite found the place where I would like to write instead, but Hatena does give a wider range of options to embed stuff, not to mention coloring options...
The main reason why I'm not using Wordpress for that matter is due to the Wordpress editor, which is unsurprisingly full of fluff. I prefer an editor that doesn't really get in my way both visually and functionally and so far most blog platforms do that, except Wordpress.
But that all said and done, Svbtle just does not have enough features that I've come to enjoy from normal blogging platforms. Heck, I might even move to Blogger if I needed more control over my blog, without all that fluff.
I might be writing regularly again, but that will have to depend on the status of my research project, because I may also be going to be writing on Qiita too. Let's hope Matlab isn't going to be a pain to deal with.
That's just me being too optimistic.
Connecting to remote computers
Reminders to self:
When someone tells you to connect to a computer through SSH with some credentials, do not automatically assume that it is an UNIX or LINUX server. No, just try typing the "mstsc" command to the "run" program and do a remote connection instead.
When someone wants you to upload the files to a server, do not automatically assume that you have FTP. No, you might need to set it up for them instead, but you will likely fail, as it will be some kind of windows 2008 server that went obsolete years ago.
Hosting your files over at github is fine. IE is fine. Everything is fine when you give up on FTP and SSH.
Having a field day wrestling with a simple file upload for a company I was working for, to replace their older webpage.
What the Singapore Government did right
I may be wrong in this fairly shallow analysis so feel free to correct me.
The Singapore Government has proved itself in governing the country, with positive GDP each year. However, while there have been opposition about the policies created within the country, especially towards foreign workers, they are likely to end up to go nowhere as the Singapore Government has probably chosen the best way to run this country, for points as follows.
Emphasis on the navy and air force.
- Singapore is a small island, surrounded by countries with larger land mass and sea coverage. The small land mass that Singapore has makes it easily run over by land troops since itself is unable to raise a huge army from the limited army bases it has. Thus it has to set its defense perimeter larger and create space and time for the government to maneuver. Singapore takes pride in its navy and air force, showcasing it in advertisements in the mass media. Navy and air forces are also mainly defensive forces, as it is nearly impossible to take over land with them alone, barring small island countries like itself. It positions Singapore as a country with no military ambition, lowering the guard of other countries against it and presenting itself less of a target towards other countries, even if it increases military spending.
Every Singapore Citizen and Permanent Resident(PR) has to go under National Service (NS)
- As stated in (1), Singapore is small, so it cannot create as many land army bases to safeguard the land. As a result, it makes the island an army base itself, arming every citizen and PR to be NS servicemen and thus, the standing land army of Singapore. As a country covered nearly with city buildings, this makes it so that every area in Singapore is covered with at least one soldier specialized in city warfare. Also, the mass media is used to stage drills, among other measures to ensure that the population is always ready to combat an external threat.
Emphasis on a clean police force.
- Due to (1) and also the fact that Singapore is a city, the most easiest way it could fall after the breaching of (1) is through city terrorism. This is also amplified by the density of the Singapore population and how it is focused in concrete buildings. As such, Singapore is always alert for city bombs and no police force can be corrupted or incompetent enough to let any of this slip through their net. In the case where the city is compromised, (2) can be invoked immediately through the mass media.
Building itself as an economic and technological hub.
- Due to the fact that every Singaporean or PR male has to undergo two-years of military indoctrination after Junior College or Polytechnic, around the time where they complete their A-level studies, by the time they reach University, most of them will have to compete with foreign students who are fresh out of high school and have most of their studies in tact. They either have to study harder or fail to compete at all to these students. Another thing is that the Singaporean trends place extremely high emphasis on examination marks, so students, without any other way of confirming their conceptual understanding outside of public examinations that are designed to take into account the whole spectrum of students, enter university and find that it is a completely new learning environment. In addition, with recent growth in the area of software development, where most successful technological entrepreneurs have their programming roots from high school and have their interest sustained without a two-year hiatus from programming, where by the time they exit they are already left behind, Singaporean males generally are simply not suited to take on technical careers that require years of uninterrupted learning and interest. However, they cannot escape from this as the country needs them to be at the ready. So, Singapore instead focuses on bringing in foreign talent and multinational companies, building itself to be an economic hub and technological hub. This has also brought about a trend of students vying to study for business courses. This in itself is necessary, as Singaporean males have been barred by the high bar of entry of technical courses. NTU itself has the best business school in Asia, which leads itself to, in a way, safeguard the future of its citizens, since the best students don't have to go outside the country.
Attracting foreign talent with incentives.
- With (4) and (2), Singapore has to inject itself with intellectual property, especially of the technical kind, since the country itself could not produce enough technical students. In this case, the Singaporean government has provided various incentives for foreign students to study and work here, so that they would be able to provide the government and the economy with sufficient intellectual muscle to function normally. Not only that, foreigners are regularly issued Permanent Resident statuses or even offered citizenship so that they have more of an incentive to continue supplying for the country. While this leads to a case where Singaporean themselves have a lot of competition to fight against, but cannot do anything against this since the foreign talents are what keeps the island alive. Nevertheless, the government has provided alternatives that do not require technical know-how such as business and marketing based careers.
In conclusion, Singapore is less likely to have a major change in policies over the next decade or so until new technology makes it possible to overcome the limits of small landmass.
Writing IT gigs and regex.
I've been doing gigs on fiverr since last year, and my most popular gig would be the IT script writing one for windows.
Apparently there are many things that you could do with the CMD prompt and powershell, but seriously using those to write programs would leave me with a bottleneck that could not be solved by using a string-only data type language without me scratching my head and praying to the heavens while vomiting all over the place, which was what I felt when I tried to extend my simple program to a full fledged application.
That was not something I'd like to experience again.
And so, for most custom jobs (i.e. complicated) I'd use D for the bulk of my work. When I first started I would use python to write things like that but the overhead of including the python executor and using cx-freeze to bundle it into an executable, while manageable, is not something I would've liked. And when I found D, the powerful language boasting a syntax as clean as Python's while allowing multi-paradigm programs among all the other features (What I used the most, coming from C++ and Java days is the import system, which was copied over from Python and the like) that is a compiled language, made me switch over to it for speed, and portability.
As Joel would have said, shipping is a feature!
Besides, having a library that was nearly as clean as Python's was a bonus. Try C++ libraries, oh was that such was a mess. So I've used D for some time now, and the one qualms I have is the package system. That really needs sometime to mature before it can be integrated. Currently I've to set up plenty of things to make dub work as my compiler and linker and even then some might not work.
But other than that, it was fine.
Today, however, I'm going to talk about writing regex, a skill that I acquired during my highschool years, and have not failed me since. While I'm not a regex master, so I won't talk about the details of regex, but just about regex in general and my experiences in it.
Regex is a tiny language that has roots in perl that processes strings, and is extremely good at it. It can search in strings, specified patterns at a pretty fast speed. I started learning from the python docs, which is a pretty good place to start with. It had been a hobby for bioinformatics at first, just going through the How-Tos. Python documentation is amazingly well written, which is the main reason it remains my most favourite language. Anything is useless if you can't find documentation on it, and badly written documentation does not cut it. I must admit, I'm spoiled by Python's documentation and I continued to search for the kind of documentation that won't make me turn away from reading it, and so far, none really cuts it.
But I digress. My main use for regex came when I started web development, using regex with Javascript, which was when I found this website that allows you to test regex patterns. I was on the verge of writing one myself, since I had been using Python's REPL to work as my test bed. With that, I started taking on more complex tasks, such as working with file names.
And so now, I was working on an app to rename all files within a folder and its subfolders and regex came up. It takes time and practice to get the hang of finding the right regex for what you're matching, and sometimes it even takes a few trials and errors before you get it right, but when you do get it right, there is that feeling of accomplishment, at least I do, until this came up.
Have fun with regex!
Just for reference
I'll list out some of my other profiles/writings/stuff here.
My main twitter handle,
Daniel Tan Fook Hao (@Melliniumorder) | Twitter
My baka tsuki profile,
My fanfiction net profile,
Just for reference, in case anyone was wondering, the twitter handle is where I might post the updates for my fanfiction net stories and baka tsuki translations.
The state of leadership in Malaysia
Political leadership in Malaysia is relatively young compared to many other countries, and yet also older than some other countries. We have a democratic system where people choose the party and people they want to govern them.
Any democratic country has to have a functional education system to complement it for it to work, and well, ours kinda work and suck at the same time, due to the lack of quality education for our students, but I will not go far into this.
If anyone has been reading the news, the main political opposition against UMNO has crumbled due to a particular leader breaking off from the originally agreed upon framework by the other two parties.
"Pakatan is dead", confirmed another party leader. That was all what we heard. It was pretty obvious that from the start this coalition was not going to work, with the direction PAS was heading.
But now, PAS has said that Pakatan is alive, and they will continue to rule Selangor with DAP. This only shows how manipulative, naive and shortsighted the PAS leaders have been, to expect for a temporary alliance and yet crushing all hopes and trust that the all the other people who has voted for them by breaking ties with the most powerful party in the alliance.
Let us not lie to ourselves here, in spite of how DAP downplays itself, it has the most seats among the opposition in recent years, and the surge in PAS seats last election was simply caused by the fact that it was in support of, or shall we say in a coalition with DAP.
The reason why most voters dislike PAS is its strong push for hudud, by their own teachings. It is not that hudud is bad, it's that it is biased towards Muslims whereas our own constitution treats everyone, regardless of religion, the same. I understand where they are coming from, but just similar to GST, not everyone is ready for some shortsighted , naive, manipulative leader to set up a new law that would affect them.
On the other hand, if we look at it from a different side, it would seem that DAP and PKR were actually using PAS instead, by using them to propel the vote count for the last election, in spite of knowing that one day, just like now, PAS would turn its back on them. Now, with PAS off the opposition, they could leverage this to push Muslim conservatives off the political arena by showing how the people cannot trust them.
And if only UMNO knew how many Muslim conservatives are in the party.
So it seems that it is a feint and counterfeint. By then, PAS would just be the party caught in the middle of the political current, washed aside. They might survive, but it's just that, survival.
On the other hand, the PM has called to wait for the results of the audits to come out, in spite of all the surmounting evidence for sloppy financial handling of our country. What's even worse was that we have our beloved MARA chairman going back on every one of his words to say that the government did no wrong in the melbourne property buy.
“You are deemed to be innocent until proven guilty,” the prime minister had said. - See more at:
This is just hilarious.
While I applaud the comeback letter from Datuk Seri Idris Jala, his witty retort to William Pesek's peculiar (to put it lightly) article on Malaysia's economy, now this is the response I had been waiting to come from the PM's Department, (on an article from the Star, 22/6/2015, pg 28) but seriously the PM's department has not done enough to secure their credibility. No, I'm pretty sure that the audits will come out fine *wink*, but I don't think their credibility will survive another hit.
While PKR has its share of political blunders, i.e. the Kajang Move, DAP, has maintained good governance of Penang.
All in all, this is just a slaughter fest for DAP, I guess.
