The meet 2

Everyone is hoping for a free show in the bar. With the war around entertainment has been less meaningful in this quarter, save for fights and tournaments that determine the top ten ratings. It wasn't easy to find someone dare to take on one of the top ten these days, especially Baret.

"Ain't you going to stop them?" The bartender, Jackos said.
"Well, looks like everyone hopoing for a show." P said, while finishing his last drop of drink, with his back against the fighting arena that was about to take place.
"P... You're a cruel man..."
"Hey, she can look after herself. Besides..." Taking a snip on the young lady behind her, P continues "it should be Baret who needs to be careful"
"Well then, P. In that case you'll have to help clean up the bloody mess later."

P pause. The last time a fight bagan, the whole bar was in a battle riot and was turned upside down. It took him more than a week to get everything back right on. No more of those days...

"Ok ok, I'll go and see what I can do" P puts his empty drink down, and head towards the middle of the crowd...

***

Sam look upon the big guy in front of her. Big, ugly and smelly, Sam thought. With Baret almost 2 times her size, she won't have a 100% chance of winning. 50-50, Sam murmured, yet it was a chance for her to test out how good she was comparing with the top ten.

And perhaps, she can make it into the top ten as well.

Sam's hand slowly reach for her katana on her back. It won't be easy to make a move without notice. I should have prepared, Sam thought. Now all the she needs to do is to wait for Baret's attack and make a counterattack...

Before Sam manage to reach for her katana, Baret already make a move. His left hand's punch already on his way to Sam's face. He's faster than I thought, Sam blinks. Preparing to take the hit, as there's no other place for her to dodge in the small bar.

Then suddenly, a shadow shows up between Sam and Baret. Baret's big metallic hand came to a pause, while Sam's hand, which was already grasping the katana and waiting for counterattack, was halted by a strong grab by the wrist. Not really hurting her, but the grab is strong enough to stop her movement.

Baret's angry eyes stared on the man that stops his punch. "P!!! This is none of your bussiness! Move away before I punch you as well!" He shouted.

"Oh Baret old friend. Since when you like hitting ladies?"
"Move away before I..."
"Comeon Baret, don't make this place a bloody pool alright? Jackos will had a hard time to clean it up" P said, and he murmured inside him "And I had to clean all these too"

A strange look appeared on Baret's face. He finally put his hand down, and said "Pussy, you're lucky this time. Team, let's prepare for our mission" Baret left the bar with his team.

"Phew, that was a close call, girlie" P said, as he move to face the little girl.
"Would you mind to let go of me?" Sam said, still stuggling to get her hand free.
"Promise you won't chop me to pieces?"
Sam pause. She had hidden her katana well behind her back, and it won't be easily to see it. But how would this guy knows? Sam nodded his head, and release her hand on the katana.
Her hand was also released from P's grab.

***

Who would have ever thought, this is the first meeting of the two, which marks the begining of the story itself.

Les Propheties

Nostradamus, a world well-known writer of prophecies. Perhaps the name might seems stranger to most of us, but if you think back the few years back when people keeps talking the world's end during the millenium celebration, that's a part of Nostradamus' work (or was interpretted that way). I recently watch a special programme on Nostradamus on Discovery, and it does sound interesting on his work.

Or so it seems to be, till I looked at his work, Les Propheties.

With the help of the internet, it was quite easy to find the old work around. Take a look at here Yowusa The site is nice enough to host the original transcript and even a translated version. Certainly I can't read the original version (Spanese?) and I can't even figure out the translated one as well. Hmm... prophecy or not, seems like it will only know when something happens.

Wiki's article on Nostradamus

ASM, everyone?

Tech savy... ASM is actually means Assembly Language (or Assembly Machine Language... can't remember) is among the lowest level of programming language nowadays. In a recent article I read just now Slashdot | Is Assembly Programming Still Relevant, Today? I notice that the debat is more or less focus on the usefulness of ASM. I've seen ASM codes (but I'm not the coder) and they are quite programmer's nightmare if they do not know ASM well (like me) ASM is useful for direct comunication with the hardware, and normally are used to speed up or obtimize certain routines that are slow in other higher level language. There's a point that I like mentioned in the thread, a lot of people are coding their programs to run in multi-Ghz machine. This is a kind of trend that I actually notice quite long ago, that people are always aiming to make program for latest machine.

Not really to blame them (because I'm used to be the same), since it was fairly simple to ignore the optimization coding that was pretty hard to maintain, and sometimes it was more fairly simple (simpler readability) to write a program than to build a program that's optimize for speed. I remember someone post a solution for a simple routine to check wheter input receipt is letters. The *stupid* routine is to loop through all the input characters and check their ASCII codes. Well, not exactly wrong, but there's simpler method for such solution that are proven faster in ASM. For most of new programmers nowadays, ASM is not learned (except for some courses and engineering) and so they do not know the importance of ASM.

Master wooo....

Was preparing for the final phase for my Master right now. Back and fought I went to settle bunch of things, sending up to 6 copies of my thesis here and there. Well, Master is not that cheap, and I've been rethinking back whether I should have done it at the first place (Kinda late to think about that right now)

My lecturer thinks that my project is a simple go. Hmm... I would have say it was fairly simple, except that you had to deal with the DICOM file formats yourself. There're a bunch of tools which I can use, but at most case, the tools normally need extra $$$ or are simply too complex to be used. So instead I just make myself a fairly simple DICOM reader that could handle most of the common DICOM format. Sounds simple? Yet my lecturer recommend 2 firsr degree students to do something similar. I don't mind helping them, but they really need to do some extensive reading (er... 1000++ pages of DICOM documentation) and some low level file checking (via Hex Editor) or even some stupid trial and error (which I like and hate) Other than that, I do not really know how to help them.

Apart from master submition, I'm still waiting reply from my job agency about a job that I applied. Hmm... I was interested in the job (as the agent descript it as a interesting job). Still waiting her confirmation on interview. For the meantime I'm still a jobseeker, anyone got some nice jobs to recommend? xD

Just received a (fairly short) SMS from a old friend, mentioning that she's going to marry. Wow! Finally, some close friend of mine are getting married. Haha, although I did receive a number of invitation from my friends before (close and not so close) I didn't manage to go either of them (mostly I'm not around or fallen sick) Hopefully I should be able to go to hers since she book me so early for now. xD

Speaking of marriage, seems like a lot of people around the mid 20s are either thinking or worried about it. Well, the question is, Do we really need to get marry? Hmm... if we look back to the history, marriage is actually just a ritual to bind 2 people together (in order to give birth to new generation, etc) Alas, the world is now suffering from overpopulation, so why do we need to keep on reproducing? LOL, I'll certainly be killed by my parents if they sees this. xD

What's Up Lately...

Wooo... Signing into Live Spaces and only found that I've been missing for quite some time (about a month? ) So what have I been up to? Most of the time the geek inside me is doing a programming project (unfortunately, it's not my master project, or even a project that can be sold, more on that later) Never thought that I'll be hooked up to it for so long.

Anyway, one day John manage to drag me out from my programming missery, to go for a big sale event on computer parts. Nice, who wouldn't like to have a Bluetooth connector or a 1GB thumbdrive for 1 bucks? Yet, it wasn't so easy to get into the mall. The Digital Mall was so crowded that it was almost impossible to get in. And yeah, both me and John hate the staffs arrangement that only selected people can get into the mall, while the rest will have to wait outside (aa... WHAT?) To get an idea of the crowd, check out these two photos... an hour before and an hour later...



An hour before...

An hour later...

Hook myself recently on Linux. John manage to grab a Linux cd for me from his company. Nice... been wanting to port to Linux for sometime now. It was years since I touch Linux (back when Linux is still a baby, and I have to write my own driver to get it to work) Installation process is simple and smooth, only need some customization and driver fetching, and there we go, my testing Linux platform. KDE and Gnome sure looks so much better than they used to be, and I got whole tonne of new stuff to learn. Think I'll be missing for another month...

My catalog program that was built for my own use is more or less completed. Ability to make my own catalog field, adding disc's info seems to be working nicely, however due to SQLite that tends to lock up the whole database whenever writing table etc. Maybe I'll try to rewrite the writing process to make sure things go much smoothly (and hopefully I can speed things up for large records) Anyway, that'll will have to postpone till I'm free next time...