It is scary how many of the things on this list I have read about since childhood. They’ve been spoken of by scientists for nearly three decades now, and in most cases more. It is scary how practically no major advance has been made in most of these areas (in terms of policy and public awareness). And it gets scarier every time we are reminded how real these problems are.

We are long overdue (by magnitude of several hundred years) for at least two things – the reversal of the earth’s magnetic field, and a “Deep Impact” or “Armageddon” (the latter being one of the dumbest movies ever) style asteroid hitting the earth. Note what he says, “It is not a question of IF, it is a question of WHEN and HOW BIG.”

And we’re rapidly and still actively destroying our ecosystem, strengthening the resistance of bacteria and other harmful micro organisms, and spreading powerful uncontrollable experimental genes that defy natural processes into the wild.

All the effort and money put into stupid, pointless, dick-inspired wars and posturing and political campaigning… If nothing else, it would be a huge irony and lesson for the survivors on the day that 90% of the world population is suddenly wiped out. Perhaps, letting nature take its course is the only way to actually save mankind from itself. And perhaps, long from now, ASS (alien space ship) Anterprise would explore our world, and study with some degree of sadness the lost civilization of the Earth.

So today I bought a brand new 250 GB HDD after getting sick and tired of juggling files around my 60 and 120 GB HDD. So being someone who’s somewhat tech-savvy, I screwed and plugged in the new SATA disk happily, cleaning up the box a bit while I’m at it, cursing at the old screws a little (the head’s totally worn out and can’t be gripped by a screwdriver properly).

Boot up Windows. DVD Drive disappears, but SATA disk detected. Ok good. Install drivers, blah blah, restart computer. I thought I’d fix the DVD Drive later. After I reboot, I happily opened My Computer, and the SATA disk isn’t there.

My computer also have this quirk of randomly failing to boot-up. This usually happens if I touch anything on the motherboard- and plugging IDE/power cables around usually have that effect. I attribute this to my computer being old, and I usually just jiggle the motherboard to try and fix it.

For the next 1 1/2 HOURS I plugged and replugged all kinds of crap on my computer trying to get my SATA HDD to show up on My Computer. After 1 1/2 hours, I decided to check Device Manager to see if XP have actually detected it. It has! /shock

I go to drive management… the reason why the new disk isn’t showing up is because it isn’t formatted.

…

/deep breath

/calm

I activate the hard disk, I format it. It’s been too long since I last installed a disk, and one that’s not factory formatted at that, I told myself. (My computer is still randomly refusing to boot all this while.)

What I realized was that the moment both the new disk and the DVD Drive ‘disappeared’, I was thinking that it was a cable detection or ordering problem (friend Jared didn’t help by continuously suggesting that I rearrange the cables). Read: ONE problem. You know how on House M.D. usually multiple complex medical symptoms are caused by only one real root problem? Argh. Turns out that the disk not showing up is not the same problem as the DVD Drive disappearing.

Time to fix the DVD – another series of cable unplugging and replugging for about another 1 HOUR. Nothing I tried worked. Finally, I opened the frickin’ motherboard manual. My reaction:

1. Damnit, that POST LED indicator at the back could’ve told me that my random failures to boot was due to graphics card and RAM 2 1/2 hours ago. Tightening the graphics card and exchanging the two RAM chips (silly aint it) fixed the problem.
2. $!@#!@$!@# you BIOS programmers!!!

### optional reading starts here ###

If you had two types of drives, some of the PATA type (old parallel wide-cable IDE-based Drives) and some of the SATA type which one out of these three options would you pick:

• SATA ONLY
• PATA ONLY
• PATA + SATA

PATA + SATA? WRONG! You can pick either SATA ONLY or PATA ONLY, but you can’t pick PATA + SATA, or one of your IDE channels gets overwritten.

Why on earth do the settings have the word ONLY next to it!? Any normal sane person with both types of drives would pick PATA+SATA!!! But noooooo… The PATA + SATA setting is supposed to help ‘Legacy’ OSes (yeah that’s another setting that lurks around at the top, that mysteriously gets disabled if you change this setting) deal with SATA drives by putting them as part of the second channel, effectively turning that channel off if you had a third IDE device, like say a DVD Drive. Windows XP and above are ‘Native’ OSes and therefore, can handle SATA being placed in a separate channel.

EVEN THEN, there is no reason to put the word ONLY there, when it applies to only ‘Legacy’ OSes! The only thing the ‘only’ settings does is that SATA ONLY orders the PATA drives as first, and PATA ONLY orders the SATA drives as first in the four ATA channels. Like @$!#!%!#$#@!!!

### optional reading ends here ###

To keep it short, don’t trust computer programmers to name their settings in a way which you can understand it. RTFM. Being a tech person, I should’ve known better…

/throws a bolster at the wall

/fume

I’m one of the offenders here. Bleh. From Ars Technica’s article “Put your PC to sleep, get a free pizza“:

If we take the number of college students in the US (18 million), multiply it by the 61 percent of students who have their own desktop computer, subtract the 10 percent who already use power management, and multiply that by the average KWh per year saved by power management (236.5), we get a potential power savings of 2.3 billion KWh/year. Now, take this number and multiply by the average cost of electricity ($0.0885/KWh) and you get, according to the CSCI, a cost savings of $206 million each year.

The cost saving values are probably quite different in Malaysia. Regardless, the energy consumption per person is probably quite similar, considering that most computers around the world are built using the same architecture, and are mostly Loltel and Lolsoft powered.

Not to mention that this morning, friend T just informed me that some high powered graphics cards draw the same amount of power when idling as sometimes entire PCs. Wish he gave me a link though. (EDIT: In case some don’t read comments, the link was given in a comment.)

I’ve heard a lot of arguments to support leaving the PC on and idling non-stop – to avoid the power spikes when you power on and off, to avoid the expansion and shrinking of your PC components due to constantly changing heat levels, to keep your PC burned in etc etc.

However, I have to conclude two things – the only two real reasons why I keep mine on are:

• Ongoing operations – downloads (most of all), defrag, sometimes virus scan
• Impatience – What! I have to wait for it to power up when I want to use it?! (I blame Lolsoft for this one.)

Can I still leave it on when going for lunch/dinner? Pretty please? Sigh. Gotta change own habits I guess. Now where’s that “shutdown PC when done” option on that downloader… /rummage

I looked at the settings in GTalk yesterday, and to my delight, there are two new settings for appearance, orkut and orkut Picture. The good thing about GTalk is that it updates by itself without any annoying requests to make huge downloads. The bad thing about it of course, is that it does this so quietly that you don’t realize your client has been updated.

I’ve always been dissatisfied with the old appearance layouts for GTalk – most of them look fine if you don’t choose the picture option, but once you put up the picture, the lines wrap weirdly all over the place. Either that, or the layout itself takes out too much space, and doesn’t look that great.

Turns out, most of my friends who’s been using GTalk for a while didn’t realize that there was this new orkut option either, and were all quite pleasantly surprised. I wonder how long ago a silent patch sneaked this little treasure into my client.

I was superbly exited about Longhorn and Blackcomb. I lost that excitement somewhere between a bunch of years ago and now. When I was given a Beta version of Vista to try out (I was an intern at a tech magazine for four months), I didn’t even install it. I’m not exactly sure why. When Vista came out, I didn’t really bother. When they started giving out Vista for free/cheap in the university campuses, I stayed in bed despite the strings I could’ve pulled to get myself a copy.

I think I have been :

1. purposely ignoring Vista’s features
2. purposely ignoring Vista reviews
3. telling myself that it’s not worth it upgrading now (better to wait for the bugs to be ironed out)
4. telling myself that I don’t really need to change right now, being happy with my box atm
5. telling myself that I can wait for my next hardware upgrade
6. worrying about backward compatibility problems despite the fact that I know there will be very few of them

Today, I read these two articles.

Windows Vista: More than just a pretty face

Windows Vista: Under the Hood

All I gotta say is – damnit.

Those reviews detailed some stuff which I remembered from my Longhorn and Blackcomb craze days. They also reminded me to a fact which I already know – Vista isn’t just a cosmetic change, but actually have some real improvements as an OS. Not to mention that the articles patiently and successfully describes why Vista is a big stop forward for Microsoft. There’s a third part to those reviews coming too.

I still haven’t installed Vista yet though, and I’m not likely going to anytime soon. Reason? It costs a bomb. Strange huh. I really, REALLY don’t feel like installing a pirated version of Vista even though they’re floating around all over the place over here. I’m working now. I think it’s about time. But buying Vista here is like paying half the down payment for a second-hand, five-year-old car damnit. (Home/Basic Edition? No thanks.) And I think owning a car is a higher priority.

But hey – you never know.

By now most people have probably heard things like the fact that World of Warcraft have 8 million players worldwide. Out of these, a more (or less?) than half of them are of the English speaking world – hailing from the United States, Europe, Malaysia and Singapore (Malaysia and Singapore’s clients are in English). And I think around 2-3 million are from the United States. What’s interesting is the question of how much impact these millions have on the internet world.

Well my question was semi-answered today when I came across this article that led me to the Google Trends website. Check this out (this is only for the USA) :

To give this information some context, yesterday was ‘patch day’ for World of Warcraft, where the much awaited Black Temple patch was released for the game. On patch day, WoW players will usually search for patch notes, information about new features released, and most of all, addon updates. Addons are these scripts that modify or provide additional functionality to the WoW game interface to enhance gameplay, written by various people, which you can download off various sites on the internet.

All of these terms : “klh threat meter, ct_mod, titan panel, x_perl, swstats” are names of World of Warcraft addons. The netherwing and netherdrake search terms are the names of two new mounts being introduced. If you click into the image to see the full top 100, “wow mods” happen to be at number 8. Going through the list, fully 45 – FORTY FIVE – out of the hundred most popular ‘rising searches’ today is related to wow. (You need to be a wow player who is anal about his addon collection to recognize the majority of the addon names in the list. Sadly, I recognize them all…)

It is also interesting to note that in the article I linked above, their screenshot showed a different set of rising search terms. My guess is that those were taken earlier on 22 May. Mine are most definitely taken late in the day. The moment WoW’s patch went live and the servers went down, WoW player’s searches rose to take over the chart.

Two important notes – one is that this doesn’t list the most popular searches of the day. That would be “britney spears” and “porn” hands down, on a daily basis. This list shows the latest rising trends, and demonstrates the searches which is ‘gaining prominence’ the most in a particular day. Second, it is important to note this isn’t exactly indicative of overall trends, just internet trends. World of Warcraft players are naturally computer users, and those who use addons are typically more computer savvy, and would know how to utilize search tools exhaustively as opposed to other topics any random netizen may be thinking about.

However, it’s still quite significant when you think about it, considering that the majority of Internet users are from the States. Changing the date on the trends page reveals previous days where rising search trends are generally distributed across a multitude of topics, ranging from news, fashion, star trek, to things Oprah said on her show, triggered by a myriad of events and trends. But a single event – the release of a WoW patch, conquers nearly 50% of the rising trends of searches on Google for the USA. It kinds of puts the ‘millions’ of WoW players into perspective…

/boggle

P/S On May 19 Starcraft 2’s announcement made Starcraft 2 the 5th major search term, losing to some horse gambling search.

These two words should be added to the urban dictionary. I would propose the following definition :

A feeling of fear towards the spread of information, or the existence of tools for the spread of information (specifically here, blogs) among the people served by elected and non-elected officers in power.

According to several articles in the news today, online information repression and censoring around the world is on the rise. A good article at MIT’s Technology Review quotes a researcher :

“Over the course of five years, we’ve gone from just a few places doing state-based technical filtering, like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, to more than two dozen,” says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “As Internet censorship and surveillance grow, there’s reason to worry about the implications of these trends for human rights, political activism, and economic development around the world.”

What I find rather hilarious is what South Korea does. According to the same article :

“The South Koreans block several North Korean websites,” says Nart Villeneuve, director of technical research at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. “They even tamper with the system so that when you try to access one of those North Korean sites, the URL resolves to a South Korean police page telling you, ‘What you’re trying to access is illegal, and we know your IP [Internet protocol] address.”

If the South Korean information police has a little more sense of humor, they could’ve added, “Big Brother is Watching You” to that warning message. Compared to the old crude methods of blocking which required national ISPs to ban an entire domain (like the whole of blogspot) or other similar measures, governments now have much more control over the methods which they may use to control information. It would appear that this new level of sophistication in information repression has arrived thanks largely to technology provided by US companies. Also interesting, is that Thailand is blocking YouTube, that some countries block Google Maps (too much geography is bad!) and Skype and that some countries are practicing election-time-only censorship.

Although apparently informationaphobia haven’t reached Malaysia yet, we’ve been seeing some waves of blogophobia here, especially among our politicians. There has been much written about this. But my favourite one has to be three paragraphs in an article by Marina Mahathir on The Star :

As they say, if you cannot beat them (and you cannot), then you might as well join them. Indeed, there are several politician blogs that could be very popular.

The only thing, however, is that politicians must be prepared for the Net to bite back at them. Unlike ceramahs to supporters and cosy chats to compliant reporters, netizens have a tendency to talk back, and not always very politely.

If they think you are talking garbage, they will tell you. The only solution to this is to not talk garbage, which apparently some of our politicians find very hard to do. Perhaps this explains their reticence in embracing the Net.

I wish I dared to write something as cool as that! Malaysian politicians have suggested things as funny as registering or classifying bloggers. Although the government generally seems to take a negative outlook towards blogging, every now and then we get a breath of fresh air. I feel a healthy respect for a minister who is willing to allow for the concept of public intelligence.

Many people in public office seems to think that the existence of too many information sources causes people to become confused and that people are too dumb to be able to differentiate fact from fiction, hype from truth. Are the Malaysian internet public really that dumb? I honestly don’t think so.

If there is any reason at all that the public is unable to practice wisdom in information filtering, it would have to be due to the fact they have been spoon fed information that they’re expected to believe at face value for too long. Isn’t now the time to start changing that? The only way to fight (alleged) misinformation is with information. And information technology (ironically) has completely left them behind. Catch up guys. Start your own blogs. It’s either that or internet censorship.

The reason why I’m writing this in the first place though, is far more interesting. The level of controversy towards blogging have apparently reached a level where even administrators of private institutions are afraid of it. When I proposed to initiate a blog to discuss issues related to student development, which is relevant to what I do, I was told that it is a ‘difficult’ idea and that I should hold off on it until it have been brought to a meeting and discussed. The poor administrator is so afraid of the negative view of the powers that be on blogs that he hesitates at the sound of the word.

What an irony, here I was, wanting to spend some of my time to communicate with our students – to exchange ideas, discuss issues and fill in the gaping information vacuum that exists between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Leadership by ignorance continues to be the main practice. How can we be at the same time wondering why our youth are incapable of critical thinking and analysis, and of original ideas? How can we be loudly proclaiming the importance of information technology and at the same time attempting to stem the flow of the single most liberating product of this technology?

One of the greatest leaders of all time* put it quite eloquently :

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
- John F. Kennedy

But perhaps Jefferson puts it a lot more elegantly :

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
– Thomas Jefferson

I can’t agree more.

*Imo, he deserves that for being 1 of 2 people responsible for preventing nuclear holocaust on earth.

Originally appeared on Earthwatcher.org on August 9, 2005.

Today I received this message on Yahoo! Messenger :

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August. It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will cultimate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65M miles of earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Share this with ur friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again…^_^

If Mars ever truly comes so close as to become the same size as the moon to the naked eye, I don’t think I’d want to stick around. I’d run – if there was a way to run from this blue ball we live on. But wait – this Yahoo! Messenger message isn’t even the original hoax. The original one goes around in emails, and is much more scientifically accurate than the Yahoo! Messenger version.

This is an excerpt from the original hoax :

The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.

Yes, you gotta MAGNIFY the bloody image of Mars 75 times to make it look the same size as the moon. READ – get a TELESCOPE!!! 25.11 arc-seconds is a small dot in the sky. The moon is approximately 1800 arc-seconds wide. Apparently our friendly Yahoo! Messenger editor when trying to fit the message accidentally revealed his total lack of comprehension for simple English. Which of course made the hoax even worse. And people actually believe it…

Anyways, this Mars coming close to earth event actually happened in 2003, something I remember being quite excited about. The author of the original hoax simply changed the year from 2003 to 2005, and kept all the scientific sounding numbers. The guy who changed 2003 to 2005 may be laughing his ass off right now at the additional Internet spam he created, but the guy who started the Yahoo! Messenger thing accidentally revealed his abject idiocy. Ouch.

For more information visit :
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/mars-earth-close.html, or you can do what I did – search “mars close August” in Google.

Why Do It?

I can accept that most people do not have enough knowledge on astronomy to know that Mars cannot possibly be as big as the Moon in the sky with the distances we’re talking about. I can even accept that they never noticed that this exact same thing was going around in 2003. (It was so popular that my friends Tom, Dick and Harry, who had zip-nada interest in Astronomy was calling me to go up the hill to check out the red planet.) What I can’t accept is, why forward something when you know it might not be true?

What most amazed me about today’s Yahoo! message was the response of the guy who sent it to me when I told him that it was a hoax and sent him the link that proves it. He asked me to reconfirm based on my knowledge of astronomy that it isn’t true. When I asked him why he didn’t just read the link, he said, “… the link is just another URL from another website …” He had the good sense not to trust just any information from any site…

I was like, “WTF” for a brief moment, before moving on to, “…” and after that just, “???”

Why on earth is a totally intelligent person (you’ll just have to take my word that he’s respectable and smart) who have the notion of mistrusting doubtful sources of information, spreading out stuff which he isn’t sure is true or not? Could it because a ‘trustworthy’ friend sent it to him?

Misinformation Galore

More than once I’ve gotten really annoyed with friends who are so blatantly ignorant that they forward some of the most ridiculous crap around. I usually try and inform them that what they just sent me isn’t true, and that they should at least try to correct the misinformation they just sent out. I’ve received all kinds of mixed responses, “Just ignore it if you don’t like it.” or “I’m concerned cause it sounds serious.” or “Why do you care.” Some (many) often get pissed, and tell me to mind my own business. Some feel hurt that I did not appreciate their effort.

If forwarding crap is such a wonderful thing, why not? Why not we all just sit down for tea, and come up with the most ridiculous stories to tell each other. (Oh wait – we already do that.) Why don’t we just keep lying to each other. If you believe ALL the hoaxes you are sent, you may believe that storing the words “ICE” (in case of emergency) as part of your contacts in your phones now will allow people to steal your credit. You’ll believe that Osama have been captured (and really get virus infected in the mean time). You’ll believe that aspartame (an artificial sweeteener you’ll probably know as Equal) causes an impossible amount of diseases/health conditions. You’ll believe that Penny Brown is still missing.

You’ll believe that HIV infected needles wait to prick you at petrol stations in Florida, in Canada, in Singapore, in Australia, and of course, in Malaysia. (Apparently the police chiefs of all the different cities all issued the exact same warnings – WOW.) And of course, CNN have announced the same damn WORST VIRUS EVER every day of every year since the year 2000. Not to mention the hundreds of sick kids you thought you helped save by forwarding a miserable email. Oh – and why haven’t you come up with a plan to save Africa by giving each African an email address? Why not – they can forward Bill Gates’ email and get 1000 dollars!!!

Also, every time you forward emails to a group of people, you unwittingly fill each of their inboxes with tons of spam, and more so every single time you forward them emails. How? You reveal their email addresses – which they told YOU and only YOU, to tons of other people, who may or may not know them. When some of them forward, they forward your email address, and the addresses of all the people you forwarded your mail to, to a whole bunch of new people, who then forward it on…

The Cost of Ignorance

Hoaxes have ruined countless reputations, endangered lives with fake medical information, generated unnecessary widespread fear and spread REAL viruses. Because that’s basically what it is. Lying to each other until we no longer know what’s safe to eat, what email is safe to open, what to store in our handphones, whether a kid is really missing – basically the difference between truth and lies. Don’t we already get enough misinformation from evil malicious sources who often want to sell us something? Do we want misinformation from well-meaning sources too? Do we want to BE one of those sources? Shouldn’t we put more thought into stuff we send to our friends? Especially since some of them might just trust us enough to act on it.

Sometimes I wonder why I get annoyed at these things. I’m definitely not annoyed because someone sent me an email to delete – I use the keyboard faster than practically everyone I know. I’m mad because lies are being perpetuated – to LOTS of people. I’m annoyed because my friends are being lied to. And I’m annoyed because it makes me lose faith and respect in my friends, and I WANT to respect them.

Learn some etiquette. Remember, every time you receive an informative email that begs to be forwarded :

ASSUME THAT IT IS A HOAX UNLESS YOU
CAN CONFIRM THAT IT IS TRUE

Come August 27, thousands of unfortunate idiots around the world would be staring into the sky looking for a HUGE red ball the size of the moon, because they trusted friends. All of them have Internet resources enough to receive emails or instant messages, but do not have brain resources enough to do a few keyword searches on Google to check that information.

And thus, the cycle of idiocy and ignorance perpetuates itself…