Part of his advice revolves around "look[ing] at PAP's record before voting" (The Straights Times, February 27, 2006).

Intelligent political commentary aside (like you're gonna get that here), it seems to me that for a country-state with a single-party rule since its independence, a citizenry which votes purely by "PAP's record" solely will ensure that PAP remains in power for the foreseeable future. At least until it somehow manages to unravel its performance for the last 40 odd years, something which I think will take a remarkable lack of ability on the part of the ruling party to achieve within a few years.

String together what Straits Times has reported, the message I get is:

a) Contest is good as it keeps us on our toes. Caveat: The Others must lose
b) Think of what PAP has done
c) Vote for PAP, keep your jobs, your house and let your children have a future
d) PAP stands for Singaporeans (alternatively, PAP is Singapore)
e) More "freebies" when nearing election period

Without a credible and strong opposition, probably all points are largely valid (point (e) is meant to be a joke). However, I must say that (c) reminds me of what a political animal will say. Rather heavy-handed and over the top. Had it been issued by the WP or any other opposition party, it will no doubt invite the scorn of PAP, which will then proceed to fling (b) at the wayward opposition party. I can probably spy the Pygmalion effect at work somewhere.

Filed under: News, Singapore

Remember my indignant post regarding this unspeakable charade of a novel? I'm not gonna finish the list, because reading the book hurts too much. With its amateurish writing style, nonsensical plot and totally unlikeable characters, the book's not worth the time it'll take to finish reading it. I'd rather reread Moby Dick, the classic I abhor most. Three times. The only redeeming quality of Digital Fortress? I don't own a copy.

However, let me guess the ending of the story:

(a) the "Most Trusted Person" will turn Judas
(b) there is no "Unbreakable Code" (well, duh)
(c) the two "genius" survive overwhelming odds despite their stupidity and lack of receptivity to ten thousand blatant clues and then proceed to breed like rabbits, thereby ensuring more stupid people in Dan Brown's fantasy world
(d) Someone points out the fatal flaw (see point 8) of TRANSLTR and the terrorists laugh to death

Point (d) is a bit shaky, but I'm willing to stake (a) on my reputation. Point (a) should work for all of Brown's published and unpublished novels as well.

Filed under: Books, Rant

Amazing. I thought I was stupid to lose my stuff in the changing room, but how gullible can you be to fall for such an old trick? Maybe the victim was a bleeding heart. Or maybe the conmen threatened to give him/ her a bleeding heart. Or maybe The Stupid Fairy just made a surprise visitation to NUS as well. She sure does get around on campus.

In any event, NUS should make it a habit to give more security alerts like this, especially when they plan to con students raise fees in the near future (by the way, that means next year).

----------

Sent: Friday, 24 February, 2006 4:48 PM
Subject: FW: SECURITY ALERT - CONMAN STRIKES AGAIN!
Ref: OED/CS/---/----
24 February 2006

Deans of Faculties/Schools
Directors of Institutes/Centres
Heads of Departments
Masters of Halls of Residence

SECURITY ALERT - CONMAN STRIKES AGAIN!

Campus Security has received a fresh report of a conman and his accomplice operating
on campus. In this latest incident, the victim (a NUS student) had sympathised with
the two suspects and handed over some money - only to realise later on that he was
conned. The suspects (a plump 1.7m tall Chinese male in his 30s with his hair dyed
brown and his partner a plump Chinese female in her 20s who acted as a lookout),
were well dressed in black and claimed that they needed money for accommodation and
meals. The tricksters suggested to the victim to use his ATM card to withdraw money.
They even provided a fictitious business card to the victim.

We strongly advise all staff and students to report strangers asking for money or
behaving suspiciously to Campus Security at 6874 1616 or the Police at 999. DO NOT
hand over cash to strangers or provide accommodation to them.

For more security tips, please visit
http://www.nus.edu.sg/oed/services/csd/security/index.html. Thank you.

P. Samynathan
Manager, Campus Security
Office of Estate and Development

----------

Filed under: NUS

I've finally figured out the pre-webhost shift address of my xml feed. Since the new feed is cold as three-day old pizza, I'm moving back to the old feed address here after this post.

For the last time, hopefully.

In the meantime, SingNet is screwing around with me and most of my games and utilities/ services/ programs cannot connect. That acrid smell you detect is the foam overflowing from my mouth. The best part? Technical Support requested for an ipconfig, said they'll monitor my connection, thanked me for my call, and told me to call back again at night.

I shall not even go into how that sounds like a SAF 'taichi' (read: shifting responsibility) tactic. That they think I can survive seven hours without all my programs running is preposterous enough. Therefore, seven hours shall come three hours early for them.

Filed under: Blog

The advance trailer for Guild Wars: Factions is out! I have watched it a few times, and can barely restrain myself from bouncing up and down like a hyperactive 5 year-old kid with a new toy.

- Get the trailer here.
Catch a glimpse of the sprawling architecture and environs. Also don't miss the new weapons and spells, especially the barrier-like urn (ritualist?) and the summon (warrior? assassin?).

- Get the trailer music here.
The funky sounds are from the trailer gameplay, since this is a direct video to mp3 conversion.

- Get the original Factions theme here.
A slower version of the trailer theme. Also currently the logon theme for Guild Wars.

In fact, I'm so psyched now that I'm going to make my webhost unhappy by playing the new mp3 everytime this post loads.

Filed under: Gaming, GuildWars

I've just started reading Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, and am appalled at the total abandon of basic facts. That it is just fiction really does not exonerate the author from skipping research or ignoring facts. Originally, I was pretty impressed by the details in The DaVinci Code. Digital Fortress has made me wonder if the former was just as error-ridden as its predecessor.

This post is an ongoing list of oddities as I read the amazingly confused story:

1) Pg 35 - 38: Confusion between characters and bits. A 64-character key does not equal a 64-bit key. The original ASCII character set had 7 bits per character; the extended ASCII set had 8. A 64-character key would have at least 448-bits. (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 10/10)

2) Pg 36: TRANSLTR has 3 million processors? IBM's Blue Gene has 1 million processors, and IBM had to overcome the problem of processors failing routinely. I'm no computer engineer, but with the bottleneck in performance and memory, a distributed system might actually work better than TRANSLTR's "iceberg" architecture. (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 2/10)

3) Pg 43: 10,000-bit keys. Most encryption standards employ 128 or 256 bit keys. Since TRANSLTR is supposed to be top secret, who in their right minds will use 10,000 bit keys? (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 4/10)

4) Pg 43: Segmented keys, illegal looping, cellular automata. All are common terms but their application to encryption is unknown to me. Nonsensical jargon? (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 2/10)

5) Pg 43: Finetuning the TRANSLTR. TRANSLTR is a brute-force-type codebreaker. Iterating through the finite keyspace of a key hardly requires any finetuning in terms of programming. (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 6/10)

6) Pg 35/ 43: TRANSLTR takes 10 mins to break a 64-bit key, and 1 hour to break a 10,000 bit key. First of all, assuming that the time taken to break a 64-bit key increases linearly when it comes to the 10,000 bit keys, the operation should finish in over 1500 minutes, or or approx. 26 hours. It therefore seems TRANSLTR requires warm-up time. Furthermore, the increase in time needed is not linear but exponential. The actual time taken should be so much more significantly higher than 1 hour. (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 10/10)

7) Pg 46: Bergofsky's Principle- no key is unbreakable. Doesn't exist simply because there is no "mathematical guarantee" that all encryption can be broken. The one time pad has been mathematically proven to be unbreakable, as long as several criteria are fulfilled (Google 'Shannon, unbreakable' if you're so inclined) (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 10/10)

8) Pg 47: If TRANSLTR cannot understand the cleartext when it has found the key, it continues iterating. This is the dumbest thing I've read so far. Accordingly, if a terrorist were to send encrypted gibberish, TRANSLTR will indefinitely stall because the translated cleartext is non-recognizable and it thinks it hasn't found the key. The terrorists will have a field day. Furthermore, this fatal weakness also ensures that TRANSLTR is bound to fail as long as more than 1 key is used. Since breaking the first key still results in a non-recognizable cipher, TRANSLTR will never know it has found the first key. This is known as multi-layered encryption, and it is not uncommon. (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 11/10)

9) Pg 47: Rotating cleartext. Not only does rotating cleartext not exist, but by the given definition of "shifting decrypted cleartext over a time variant" to achieve "perpetual mutation", it will result in the receiver never being able to read the entire cleartext since the decryption process never ends. Encryption is pointless if there is no cleartext to read. (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 8/10)

10) Pg 49: Bragging about making a brute force resistant algorithm. I wouldn't do that if I were him, since all it takes is to google "unbreakable encryption" to find the one time pad/ Vernam cipher. Which self-respecting programmer doesn't google? (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 6/10)

11) Pg 50: Biggleman's Safe. Never heard of it. (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 1/10)

12) Pg 68: Viruses in TRANSLTR. Ciphers are usually plaintext. Getting hit by virus infections when no one knows the existence of TRANSLTR would be really stupid. You'd think with 3 million processors, the programmers could have bought a better virus scanner that's more reliable than the dubious sounding Gauntlet. (I-cannot-believe-he-wrote-that-scale: 3/10)

Filed under: Books, Rant

Official Information:

Software Engineering
6.15pm to 9.30pm
Classroom 3-3

ISS Interpretation:

Software Engineering
6.15pm (maybe) to 8.35pm
Bugger the insignificant researchers who:
a) informed me that they need to survey my class at the end of the lesson
b) waited many ungodly hours so that they can conduct their experiments
c) arrived at 8.45pm, 45 minutes ahead of time
d) had to trudge across the campus at night only to arrive to an empty
Classroom 3-3

Filed under: NUS, Rant

An excerpt from The Rule of Four, which I think is pretty good:

... we're all fishermen telling stories about the one that got away. But to this day, I'm not sure how Chaucer's Prioress interpreted Virgil, or how Virgil interpreted love. All that stays with me is the picture my father showed me, the part he never said a word about, where the two naked women are watching Love bully the satyr. I've always wondered why Carracci put two women in that engraving, when he only needed one. Somewhere in that is the moral I took from the story: in the geometry of love, everything is triangular. For every Tom and Jenny, there is a Julius; for every Katie and Tom, there is a Francesco Colonna; and the tongue of desire is forked, kissing two but loving one. Love draws line between us like astronomer plotting a constellation from stars, joining points into patterns that have no basis in nature. The butt of every triangle becomes the heart of another, until the roof of reality is a tessellation of love affairs. Taken together, they have the pattern of netting; and behind them, I think, is Love. Love is the only perfect fisherman, the one who casts the broadest net, which no fish can escape. His reward is to sit alone in the tavern of life, forever a boy among men, hoping someday to tell stories about the one that got away.

Filed under: Books

"Name five of life's simple pleasures that you like most, then pick five people to do the same. Try to be original and creative and not use things that someone else has already used:"

1) Curling up on the bed or couch with a good book, the entire day
2) Sucking on Starbuck's mocha frappucino (technically, Pangy provided neither brand nor type so I'm not cheating) at the end of a long day
3) Denying kiasu aunties or uncles who elbow me aside their MRT seat
4) Finding a unique shop relatively off the commercially-beaten path (e.g, Das Erzgebirge-Haus on the 3rd storey of Raffles Shopping Centre)
5) Peaceful family meals
6) Emails/ SMSes from Intrepidette
7) Finally learning how to count and therefore knowing I've went beyond 5
8) Refusing to tag people

I think I'd make a really bad researcher.

Unless good researchers:

1] chafe at having to wait 8 hours to conduct a 1 hour experiment
2] mentally curse and swear at target respondents who do not participate and wish that they'll miss their bus, train, taxi or approximately 10,000 green lights on the way home
3] verbally curse and swear at respondents who circle "neutral" indiscriminately
4] snarl at flippant respondents who have the I-did-nothing-to-earn-the-reward-money-and-you-know-it-but-can't-do-jackshit look on their faces
5] have to restrain themselves from whacking respondents who do not read instructions, do not ask questions, answer all questions incorrectly, and yet still remember to collect their reward
6] heap tons of verbal abuse on the clueless sods who failed your exceedingly simple manipulation checks and wonder how they got past secondary school
7] feel like handing out a definitive answer sheet together with the experiment sheet
8] think of absconding with all the reward money to Bihimi and getting a new identity as a retired dotcommer named Carlos who is brown as a monkey

No. I really don't think I'd make a good academic researcher.

Filed under: HYP, NUS