Year: 2008

MyBlogLog: Where Have I Been?

I am a little embarrassed to admit that I have neglected MyBlogLog for quite some time that I never noticed that it has been bought by Yahoo!.

I did wonder on how some people get very nice MyBlogLog widgets and today I decided to check it out. I was asked to link my account to Yahoo! when I tried to log into MyBlogLog. And as you can see I have activated the new widget.

It turns out Yahoo! decided to leave the old widget codes alone and it has worked all these while 🙂

Old Vs New:

p/s – no offense to Onyx Design I was not trying to delete you but when I captured the screen I had my mouse hovered on top of your icon and too lazy to re-capture.

Google Chrome: More Findings

Actually, if you really watch the 52-minutes video or read the whole manual you might already know about these cool features. And then again maybe not. I didn’t have the time to go thorough with the documents / videos so I am just documenting based on casual use.

One of most obvious feature would be the “Inspect element” contextual menu. As a Firebug user this screen is no stranger to me.

I have not figured out whether Chrome can display real time resources such as JavaScripts and CSS loading like what Firebug does in its “Net” panel.

Another interesting feature I just discovered is the “Open link in incognito window” contextual menu that will appear every time a right click is done on a link.
Continue reading Google Chrome: More Findings

Google Chrome: My Findings So Far

Like Rizal, I was also thrilled to try out Google Chrome when I saw the posts in nazham.com and dirn.name.

I am simply discussing my initial findings, and we all know it’s Beta. This is by no means an official or detailed review. This is what I have encountered so far while using it casually.
Continue reading Google Chrome: My Findings So Far

Ramadhan: McDonald’s Breakfast Starts at 5.00

I have just returned from a short trip to Taman Equine McDonald’s to look for some light food for sahur. It was exactly 4.22 AM when I arrived at the drive-thru. We wanted to have the big breakfast set but the voice on the display said “during Ramadhan breakfast starts at 5.00 AM”.

I said thanks and left. I just want to warn everyone because I’ve never heard of this special change during Ramadhan. A bit disappointed but it’s OK.

Jusco Baby Cots

We went for baby shopping again on Saturday, this time at Mid-Valley. Surprisingly there are not as many choices as in The Curve. We’re looking for a cot, stroller, car seat, and playpen.

While in Jusco I saw this sign on one of the baby cot:

I know I know, it means don’t put your child in the display unit. But it sounded at first like do not ever put your child in the cot bought in Jusco 😉

Blogging Frenzy

There is an interesting development at my current office where people are starting to create their own, self-hosted WordPress installations. This is a very good culture! And all this thanks to Mr Rizal, the blogging evangelist (or should I say WordPress evangelist?).

I hope he’s not just doing this because he’s leaving us soon! Sob, sob!

Bravo you guys, keep up the good work. When you are ready just let me know, I still have space in my blogroll. Or, do I?

Subscribe To Comments

I am a blogger. (What a stupid statement when writing a blog post). Anyway, I just wish everyone could install the Subscribe To Comments plugin so that I will know when they (or anyone for that matter) responds to my comments.

Today I have to remember which blog post I posted my comments on and wait for it to load. Yes I know I am just being lazy.

Trust me, it helps your reader. And for what it’s worth loyal visitors will still need to load the post page to see your respond. That is traffic for sure.

The best thing of all is that it is virtually maintenance free. You can manage it if you need to but from my experience using it for more than a year I don’t need to do anything.

I would also like to ask that visitors to this blog tick the subscribe checkbox if they are asking questions. It’s much more convenient plus you’ll know when I respond. Unsubscribe link is always provided in the emails you will receive.

Happy WordPressing.

Telephone Harassment

Prepaid SIM cards are convenient, and there is no doubt that a lot of people in this planet have gained great benefit from them. Some countries have imposed a law that all prepaid SIM cards must be registered to the telco so that they (the authorities) can track down criminals and people who are misusing this service.

But how far does it get implemented? For example I have a DiGi prepaid number with the previous owner still registered to it. When I call customer support, they call me by the person’s name. But that’s a small matter because I am not a bad person.

What pisses me off lately is people calling me to advertise their services and products, as well as fraudulent text messages with the intention of tricking people to subscribe to their services. One amazing thing is that about 90% of them are not even afraid to show off their numbers (not having caller ID restricted).

My question is that to who do I report these annoying activities, and do the telcos actually care?

It’s immoral.

Chromatic Aberration Is My New Enemy

For those who know me, they know that I am a beginner photographer equipped with a Nikon D50 DSLR and have bought a Sigma 18-200mm DC OS lens back in February when I visited Singapore.

Since I usually take casual photographs I have never really paid that much attention to people in my photos. My subjects are usually buildings, landscape and views that I find interesting.

Earlier this month I offered to take pictures at my niece’s wedding, and also last weekend at a friend’s engagement ceremony. I was too busy to notice that aberration has occurred to my photographs for both occasions!!!

Here are the 100% crops for both occasions. Directly converted to JPG from Nikon Capture NX without any other processing.

Do you see the almost purple glow at the border between the subject and the background? I have yet to understand this phenomenon but this must have something to do with my lens or the technique I am shooting the pictures. It became a lot worst when there is high contrast between the subject and the background as you can see in the first sample above.

Right now I am totally disappointed. Any photography expert or enthusiasts reading? Opinions are mostly welcome!

Busy August

Looks like August is another busy month for me. Earlier this month I went to Terengganu for my niece’s wedding. It took a lot of work to be the organizing party. One niece married, 2 nieces, 3 nephews, and a son to go.

I took a 3-day’s leave (thanks boss!) during the first week and spent 5 days there. It was tiring especially because I had to go to work on Monday. But it was worth the hard work and money spent. Here’s a photo from the event:

For those who are not familiar with Malay customs, this is the table where the bride and groom have their special lunch. The menu is a little different from everyone else. Accompanying the bride and groom is the groom’s family since this is the bride side of the wedding. At the groom’s side it depends on the custom of the state and family. According to our Johore custom (where we originally comes from) the groom’s party is as big as the bride’s party. But since the groom is from Terengganu it’s different.

Back to real life in Selangor I have many things to settle. The house purchase matters and EPF has just been settled on Friday. And my external client is facing some problems with their mail infrastructure. I’ve just finished a script for them to maintain Postfix aliases since they have a lot of groups. I utilized SQLite and perl to achieve something like a menu system for maintaining users and alias groups. I am also very busy at my day job, since there are a lot of release issues to attend to.

This weekend I have to go shop for baby stuff again especially I heard IKEA is having a sale. What else… oh yes I just came back from watching Wall-E. It’s cute and nice but far too simple for me but I don’t expect more. It’s fun.

If I have time tomorrow I will also do a summer cleanup before the fasting month arrives. The baby’s coming out soon and we really have to do something about the junk that is cluttering our home, and think about moving plans. That is why I was thinking of an attic earlier :-D.

That’s all as an update for now I have to wake up early tomorrow!

Pull Down Ladder @ Fold Ladder @ Attic Ladder

I have recently purchased a new house, and while waiting for it to complete next year I am looking around for best deals for home renovation and decoration.

For the first phase I am going to emphasize on safety and things that needs to be done before the house is occupied. Plaster ceiling, wooden skirting for the walls, paints (and colors) for the walls, and also an open attic since the top floor has a considerably high ceiling.

For the open attic, I am looking for samples of pull down ladder to be installed. It serves 2 purposes: to have a tidy area and to prevent the little one coming out in December from climbing it. I can’t seem to find online catalogs that offer products in Malaysia. Well, to be fair even Home Depot does not have it in the online catalog.

I found a nice picture from Wikipedia, only that the ladder is too simple and aesthetically not so nice.

Anyone knows of a website or shop that I can visit?

Aicu Kopitiam & Cafe

Earlier today I went to Wangsa Maju to pick up some things for my niece’s wedding next week. For lunch I decided to try out shops in the Wangsa Link area. My friend who owns a business there recommended a lunch at Aicu Kopitiam & Cafe.

Since it was hot we decided to sit inside where it’s cooler. The overall ambiance is nice with old music playing in the background. We ordered a Barli Lemon Ais (Iced Lemon Barley) and an Teh O Ais (Iced Tea) and there was no delay at all before the drinks were delivered. Good. However instead of lemon they used LIME. Yes, lime.

Food is a different story. We ordered a Penang Kuay Teow, Nasi Goreng Kampung (Kampung Fried Rice), Telur Mata (Fried Egg), and Cucur Ikan Bilis (Anchovy Fritters).

After about 15 minutes, the Penang Kuay Teow arrived. 10 minutes later, the Fried Rice arrived. I was too hungry and started digging immediately. The fried egg however arrived 10 minutes later, when I was about to finish so I canceled it. The fritters arrived 15 minutes after that.

So the total wait time:

  • Penang Kuay Teow – 15 minutes
  • Fried rice – 25 minutes
  • Fried egg – 35 minutes
  • Fritters – 50 minutes

The food portion is a bit small for the price, and the food taste is OK. Not great but OK. I can eat that if I have no other choice.

As a very fussy restaurant customer I always expect to get the exact menu I ordered. The first example where lemon is being substituted by lime clearly shows that there is no such thing as quality control. What you order is not what you get (WYOINWGY).

One thing to note is that they use chipped ice instead of the normal tube ice so it is constantly stuck in the straw hehe. And if you’re really hungry, don’t go to this place. It’s nice if you want to have a discussion, though.

Oh yes, as with most Malay food businesses don’t expect good hospitality. The cashier didn’t even return a smile.

Next time I may try the Cheng Ho restaurant (owned by Amy Search) next to this place.

Searching for the restaurant name, I found another disgruntled customer. Well, almost customer.

The Datuk who own this place should take a look at the business better.

OCRopus and Tesseract

A friend pointed me to an open source project called OCRopus because I am currently working on a project related to OCR. Commercial OCR solutions ain’t cheap and you can really dig a hole in your pocket trying to get a good OCR solution. It’s neither the price of the hardware nor the software that is high but the amount of work that needs to be done to make sure a correct output is obtained.

Most OCR solutions need a vast amount of time to train the software to correctly identify characters. Artificial Intelligence can help but not now, not today, not yet.

OCRopus is not the one who recognize the character itself but it relies on Tesseract. OCRopus provides layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities. Sounds really good doesn’t it? Tesseract is the OCR engine that OCRopus uses.

Most of the project is tested and developed on Ubuntu, but if your platform has binutils and build tools you’re good to go. I believe it is also possible to build using Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows and of course MingGW. I went for the easiest option since I only have 2 hours to spare and I already have Cygwin on my system.

I first installed libraries header files (libpng-devel, libtiff-devel, libjpeg-devel) and build tools (gcc, make, g++, autoconf) and then built tesseract with the normal ./configure && make && make install method. To build OCRopus there is a need for Perforce Jam. Jam is actually Just Another Make. I find it a little funny when I have to build Jam using make. Oh well. OCRopus is built with ./configure && jam && jam install and it went pretty well.

To run them don’t forget to download the language files for your target language otherwise it will complain: Unable to load unicharset file /usr/local/share/tessdata/eng.unicharset

I ran my tests with standard LUA scripts that came with OCRopus (located in /usr/local/share/ocropus/scripts/) with the command ocroscript.exe rec-tess input_image > output.html

I created a 10 line Word Document with different fonts and printed it to a PDF. Using Adobe Photoshop I saved it to a JPG image. Then I gradually resized the image to the smallest I can get some output with.

To see the tests and results, click on Continue Reading.

Continue reading OCRopus and Tesseract

MMU For Sale

Yeah, you heard it right. Multimedia University (MMU) is up for sale, and it’s valued between RM800~900 million. The plan is to raise money for the high-speed broadband (HSBB) project which will cost TM RM1~1.5 billion per year.

Here’s an article from Business Times Online.

From the line While management remains optimistic on the disposal of staff loans, the group is struggling to find a buyer for the university,” the duo noted., it’s now confirmed that MMU is for sale!

I was alerted of this news while reading Amanz.