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...

Phone OS?

Phone OS? I believe anyone who owns a smartphone will know about this. An OS is the very base software that communicates with the hardware, and is basically the most important piece of software that you'll need (without it you can't operate your smartphone at all xD) Anyway, alhtough I didn't own a smartphone (poor me) but I do know that the major smartphone's OS nowadays is Symbian. Before reading the article I never thought that Symbian was such a bad piece of OS. After all, it's been on the market for such a long time, and was dominent all these years. Really odd seeing how things turns up...

Read more: Readers Write About Symbian, OS X and the iPhone

Challenge

Hook myself lately in building a flexible database system. The mai challenge in the system, is the term flexible. User specified which data to store, when to retrieve, and even design own GUI on what to show and what should hide. Deciding which part should be given free for user to play with, and which part should only be maintained by the system was pretty much difficult (at least for someone who isn't database based). Yet, the real fun is to maintain both flexible and performance together. Yes, it's both hard but fun. xD

Found myself loving a old theme song for an old anime, Brain Powerd. The ending song (literally "Field of Love") has that strange kind of feeling that suits my taste. xD

愛の輪郭

歌手：KOKIA
作詞：井荻麟
作曲：菅野よう子

愛し合う心を
育てていったあなたが
その腕を枕に
お眠りと耳にささやく
昼の言葉など忘れていいから
聞いて free fly free fly
果てなく

父とその母が
歌えなかった唄が

弾む free fly free fly
愛をまさぐる唄
信じあって 語りつげば
もっと心 滑らかになる

欲深なまどろみ
身を任せて 夢見る
子供たちの心の
灯になって欲しいと

愛する作法を
ちりばめていけば
それは free fly free fly
慈しむ海原
あなたという星 つかめば
永遠という刻にかわって

愛し合う心を
育てていったあなたが
その腕を枕に
お眠りと耳にささやく

夢に見る銀河を
まどろんだまま旅する
その瞳と唇
それだけで何もいらない

Time flows...

Is it just me or it is a fact that time flows faster this year? A new year just started and now I'm busying cleaning the house. Though, I should've clean my stuff long before now, but the my lamer side keeps holding me back. xD

Decide to dump a lot of stuff ~ old magazines (piles of them), old CDs (piles of them, mostly free CDs that comes with the magazines) and perhaps I should dump myself? 

My final project can be said is finished. Anyone wish to see what I came up with can download and install it from Sendspace. I've included some components (.Net Framework 2.0, and Win Installer 3.0) which is required for the project. Also I've included a sample to play with. It might not look too good, coz I didn't optimize anything and just generate it on the go. Give some comments if errors or bugs are found.

Pushing myself on a project for personal use. It's suppose to be a catalog program to keep track of the stuff I got, but since I'm not a 100% database student, the design itself keeps changing (LOL, coz I do not strictly follow any design methodology, and just follow my instinct) Anyway, SQLite draws my attention as a standalone database, and it's preformance are pretty nice for my own use. Target the project to be done in a month or two.

Woo... New year...

It's been quite some time that I come back here. Without me knowing, it's already new year.

So what's up with me for missing so many weeks? Let's see. Hooked up in finalizing the addtional part of my project at first. Although I'm still checking and debuging some mysterious bugs, I would officially say the project is finished, and I would be awaiting for my viva later. It's about time I finish with this project, and hopefully no more upcoming.

Currently hooked up in doujin names. An IRC friend recommend a nice doujin fighting game Fatal/Fake. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal/Fake) The game mimic the original story quite well, and it's a really good action paced fighting. However, I was drawn to another doujin RPG game (Yeah, I'm a serious RPG fanatic). The Action-RPG Chantelise (http://egs.cug.net/circle/chantelise.html) is a simple yet addictive RPG game that draws my heart. But what I really hooked up is to search for all its secret treasures and go fishing :p

Last week when over for 2 movie in a row. Eragon (http://www.eragonmovie.com/) is a classical dragon myth tales. A young farm boy was choosen to be a dragon rider, and slowly becomes a saver for the people. Basically nothing too fancy about the movie, and as expected, it's a classical story.

Sinking of Japan (Nihon chinbotsu) in the mean time, offers some additional interesting CGs. Watching each part of Japan sinking slowly, and to see the last action hero struggling to save Japan proves that Japan did it again. Just that I keeps wondering, y the hero's clothes always so clean whereas all his surroundings are covered with volcano ash? xD

Drawn by Astro new China channel, I found myself catching an everyday 10 minutes programme. The show is about China's relic, and revealing the stories behind those >1000 years relics. It's informative, and it makes you wish to have one of them for yourself. xD Check out http://www.chinarelic.com/ for more information

Life Smash!!!

Recently due to HF downtime, I was hooked up with IRC. For those who doesn't know, particularly those recently using the net, IRC is an old chatting network (that exist together even before the net, I think). Anyway, not much new user like to use IRC, since everything is command-like, and without any fancy UI like the famous MSN or Yahoo. I used IRC before, not pretty much on chatting but to fetch some Nipponsei release, which only feasible there.

IRC is pretty much fun for discussion. Since I've join in part of the modders team (as a translator that is), the debate on modding and translation does happens some time, and it's fun to watch the discussion. Some of the folks I met are geeks, and I even found myself a Sensei / teacher who's also part of the team as translator. :p I think I'll hook up in IRC for now on.

Found myself an interesting blog. Gaijin Smash is about an English teacher who teaches in Japan. His point of view of Japan, as an outsider (which Japanese call gaijin) is slightly different than what we normally sees in TV. Anyway, some of his post is pretty fun, and you'll find yourself seeing Japan in another angle.

Damn hooked up with shaders programming. I intend to add shaders into my project. A last minute rush to enhance the project, but I'm only possible to program low level shaders. Yeah, it's low-level enough, that Ill have to play with ASM instructions. Dunno what ASM is? For example to declare a variable A = 3, you'll got to

TEMP A;
MOV A, 3.0;

That's the easy part. Sometimes in order to do some simple calculation, the instructions can be quite long. And don't forget that the number of instructions are pretty much limited, and with version 1.0/1.1 (which I'm programming), conditional checking (if/else) ain't available. The newer versions, such as GLSL and HLSL would surely ease things up, but unfortunately, I do not have the resource to program them.

Phong shading is complete, though I'll need some experiment on material to get the best result of the vertex shading. Nope, I'm not going with textures. Now on my way to testing out GPGPU's concept on programming GPU. Nice ideas, but I don't know how many of the concepts apply to my old GPU...

HF closing!!!!

Oh no!!!! One of my most active community site is coming to and end!!!

Oh my, the HongFire network is a welknown community site for hentai, doujin and other japanese related stuff.
And guess what, it's not because the user who complain, it's not the Japanese company who complain, nor it's the hosting company that complain... It's the forum software company (that the site use) that complain of the illegal content and moral issues (of hentai).
LOL

Catch the disussion on digg

Christmas :)

Hohoho Christmas time again! Just went over to MidValley just for some photo shooting :p. Check out the photo album for more Christmas craze.

Fancy a tasty Christmas tree?

AutoCAD closing it's format!!!!

Oh no! Autodesk (AutoCAD) is moving to close it's famous CAD file format, DWG. Hmmm... well, those who still using AutoCAD as their primary CAD tools won't be affected, but those who use other than AutoCAD will be affected, as most of them relies on Open Alliance for their reversed engineered OpenDWG format.

Being a private member of the Open Allience, I received a mail from the alliance concerning of Autodesk suing the alliance. I'm using the library for my project, and more or less is affected as well. The library is pretty much easy to use (although not quite as user friendly as one might think), and it ease my effort to implement CAD functions in my project. Hmm... I would wonder how long the suing effort will last...

The discussion on Slashdot (http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/12/20/1348205.shtml)

Opera? Again

I just wrote that people are arguing about Opera for it's browser capability. But yet, I just read that Opera is working fine in a new prototype system for just $100. Seems that Opera is gaining some shares in embeded systems and mobiles.

Check the original post at Opera in OLPC

Opera?

Just read up a heat discussion over the "Internet Browser" war again. And this time, it targets Opera. Opera is a nice browser that I had been using since few years back. I believe back then it was v3, and now the latest is v9. Wow, it was really quite a long time.

I love Opera for it's nice and clean interface. Nothing too fancy, no loads of toolbars or buttons that I do not need, unlike those in IE, or sometimes even Firefox got. Opera is the first to introduce tab browsing back then, and a lot of other features intergrate with it, such as e-mail client, chat client, RSS reader, and even torrent downloading. Although I'm not using most of it's features, I do support Opera for it's fast loading and cache loading.

However, there's a few known issues with Opera. ActiveX won't work in Opera, and some other internet components (not sure the names) won't work as expected in Opera. If you read the post in SlashDot, you'll find different arguments on who to blame. For me, it was both the web developer AND the browser developer. Web developer to blame if their web test only works on one browser, which would be IE. I've seen a lot of site that's been based on IE, and it's not surprised that a lot of developer used IE as a standard. Lol, there're still a lot of other users that doesn't use IE...

For some web site that doesn't load up succesfully, Opera would be the cause. Well, even so I wouldn't blame too much for my lovely Opera. Nowadays it was known that ALL software contains bugs, be it some serious bugs, or just minor glitches. It should be the user side to decide which browser that suits them most. For example, I use Opera for most of the browsing, downloads, google searching, etc, for Opera is faster than any browser out there. But for some site that's not loaded up properly, I'll had to switch to Firefox (and occasionally IE if even Firefox can't handle the site). So far, I had little problem with this sites, which mostly are just blogging site (blogger, live.com :p).

So, decide whichever that suits your needs. I'll vote for Opera for the speed. :p

the arguments on Slashdot

Tired... X2...

Just come back from Rachael's convo, and was kinda tired walking here and there, taking photos, and even have a small walk to KLCC for christmas season! Yeah, I finally see the largest christmas tree in Malaysia! LOL.

 
The largest christmas tree in the country, at KLCC Suria.

Thos who seeking for Rachael's convo photos, fear not. Although my site is down (maybe for good) I've uploaded the photos (at least those in my camera) to Dotphoto The photos are slightly resized for better uploads. If you need the actual photos, I've uploaded them at Sendspace (28.4mb RAR)

Tired...

Tired... not really from the body aspect but the heart aspect as well...
Been reading, reading and reading again on some old technologies (er... 3 years?) and looking at some damn ASM codes that's hard to understand...

LOL, that's what it has to deal with when you're looking at low-level shaders. If I got new technology in my hand, I'll sure goes for GLSL or HLSL. But unfortunately, that'll be out of the question. Upgrading is no longer possible (since the old and new platform of AGP and PCIExpress), and the possible solution is to go for a new pc (which I do not have the budget)

And now, 110mb.com sure find its way to make some headache. Hosting service down, unable to login and access the site for random times. I understand the hard time to maintain the good services, but it was getting way too much down time and problems with the hosting that I'm thinking of moving the site for good. For the time being, everyone can try login the site via backup provided by the host. But, yet, even the backup contains some errors as well. LOL.

I've found a good site (or at least seems to be) for hosting the forum. JConserve claims to be the #1 phpbb hosting company, and for just the hosting, it seems fairly nice and efficient. The gallery will be either stripped, or thinking of using dotPhoto which seems to be a nice image hosting site, although got some minor problems. Well, everything shall had to wait till 110mb.com let me access my forum for good to backup, and to restore them to the new forum.

Time seems to pass up quite fast when you're either busy or hooked up with something. Recently beside reading and researching for shaders development, I've hook up with a nice little flash game. A C70 doujin hgame that is, and unlike most flash games that just provide CGs, this game requires some skills, patient, and a lot of luck in order to really beat it. Check it out.

Dillema... of old and the new

I had once said that my project is in it's completion. Yes, the basic objective is completed, but I found the project is just a collection of methods and tools that existed for the past few years. In short, nothing new in it. So, with every time I got right now, I venture into something quite new in graphic programming, shaders.

Actually, shaders is not new. It's already exist for the past few years, yet it only emerge recently with the great supporting power of technology and GPU. So, what is shaders? Shaders is a small piece of program, that instead of execute in your cpu, it is run in your gpu (graphic card). The actual implementation of the shaders is to take the heavy load out of cpu, and thus improve the performance or gaming experience (in which shaders are mostly used)

As technologies improve over the last few years, so do shaders. In the past, shaders are called low-level shaders, as the programs are mostly in ASM alike syntax, but recently GLSL and HLSL are emerging, and it ease programmers to write their shaders easily. So now I'm in a serious dillema, to learn either the new shaders (GLSL or HLSL) or the low-level shaders. GLSL / HLSL is going to be the main stream for shaders from now on, but as you know, newer technologies means newer requirement. My old Radeon 8500 doesn't support GLSL. However, low-level shaders (via ARB_vertex_program) are supported, but low-level shaders are quite hard to follow, and it doesn't worth since the introduction of GLSL. Haih... what to do now???

POV

A lot of things happens in the past few days. Well, of course not just the event of eating, drinking (and of course breathing), other events that seems to happen now and then. Most of them changes my certain point of view (POV).

To begin with, I believe everyone know the word, rats. Yeah, almost everyone hates them, or scare them. Those tiny creatures that creep around in the dark, and keeps destroying furnitures or causing havocs in house. Nope, I dun like them, and with my house full with rats, it's actually a wonder how I can live with them for so long.

Yupe, my house is full of them. I've seen some largest rats around, almost the size of a small kitten, and the smallest is just around 5cm long. Those damn rats ain't dumb, and are actually very clever, very very clever indeed. Most of the food that was stored in plastic container was bitten to holes (the only one that survived is tin container. Chili saurce anyone? Yeah, even the rats eat chili (no kidding). The most clever things that I've seen is how the rats can bypass the baricades I set to keep the rats away from entering room. The small rats lift the barricade (which is actually plastic that blocks the small space between the floor and the door), and squeeze themselves in. The same goes to "Sou kei" (the one chinese normally used to keep their food from flies), where the rats manage to find a way to get in and eat the yummy food there.

Enough of rats. (There's one that just run pass the living room now. LOL)

We have normally seen best selling books from successful bussinessman. Some of them teaches ways to do bussiness, while some teaches the way to think in bussiness. There're a lot of good examples of successful stories of those that follows the books, but like I said, they're just examples. The books are mainly used as a guide, to provide insight and examples for those who read. The readers will had to decide when and where to apply into their bussiness.

Yet, there's a lot of people who thinks the books as quick guideline to success. Seeing that people are doing great by following the books, doesn't mean you can do so as well. Like I remember my physics teacher once said, it's useless to remember the formula, if you do not know how to use them at the first place. The same method used by others to succeed doesn't mean the same will happen to yourself as well.

Ah... another rat kena tangkap. Nice, that makes 3 in cage now.

Been keeping myself hands full for the time being. Writing my thesis (reviewing my own draft and making adjustment while waiting my lecturer's approval), writing an english journal (which I'm facing trouble as it's been a long time since I used *proper* english), and took part in a translation project for wiktionary. Yeah, I never thought that I'll join the wiki project, but since I've been looking for a decent nice english-malay dictionary, why dun just join in the online dictionary? It got a long way to go, since the malay words in the dict contains barely <100 words. LOL

Buying Friends?

We often read or listen that friends are priceless. There's not a single value that can be tagged on friends (be it good or bad friends).

But yet, I recently read that people ARE paying to get their friends.

Nowadays community sites are growing bigger and bigger. More and more people get to know each other in these sites, and it was really a great way to get new friends, across the nations. Yet, paying in order to know one? It's more likely buying yourself a friend. And worst, a virtual friend that is.

I remember I used to post a lot in community sites. Most of the time, these sites kept a record of the number of posts, normally viewed as how popular or your status in the community. Sometimes they also grant you some virtual money (buying some virtual stuff?) and charma (for popularity, again). I used to keep posting useless post all over the place, such like "Thank you", "Hi there", etc, in order to push my post's numbers. Rethinking now, it was more or less a stupid action to do so.

Nowadays some of the community site that I kept visiting are HongFire (for Hgame and Jgame news), Anikei (for Nipponsei release and anime chit chat), and of course, my own community site. Although I'm not pretty much of a poster, yet, I don't think I'll pay real cash (ever) just to get myself popular.