blog.imranyusuff.net

Again I did it. I haven’t updated my blog for a long time. I almost forget about it.

Because I find life as fourth year engineering student is quite busy. Not because of too much work, but because I really concerned on getting my work done as perfectly as possible.

Now everything has finished, I have graduated, obtained B.A and M.Eng with Honours. Thank God. Now for some job hunting.

And one more reason is, when I write, I tend to write a lot and elaborate too much. So my future posts will be very, very short.

Like this.

For most of the European railways journey planners, they expect you to know where and when you are going, and use that to ask the system to find out the train times, and sometimes, fares.

But the problem is I already quantitatively allocated my time and budget for traveling by rail. I just want to know where I could go, and what can I do there.

Because I love traveling by train just because of the railways themselves.

Sudah 50 tahun kita merdeka dari cengkaman penjajah.

Walaupun kita telah mengecapi kejayaan demi kejayaan, dan hidup aman damai dan bersatu padu dalam suasana perlbagai kaum, tetapi sedar atau tidak, kebanyakkan individu sebenarnya belum merasai kemerdekaan yang sebenar:

• Kita masih takut dengan keselamatan harta benda dari pencuri dan peragut.
• Kita, terutamanya wanita masih takut untuk keluar, terutamanya waktu malam, memandang kejadian jenayah yang masih ada dan semakin berleluasa.
• Kita masih berasa tidak selamat di jalan raya kerana kesedaran dan disiplin di jalan raya masih tidak memuaskan.
  Lihatlah berapa banyak saman tertunggak dan berapa banyak kemalangan yang telah berlaku.
• Sesetengah rakyat masih hidup dalam keadaan susah dan miskin, malah ada juga orang kaya yang hidup terlalu mewah.

Marilah kita berusaha untuk mencapai kemerdekaan yang sebenar. Pada hari kebangsaan inilah kesedaran harus dicapai untuk kira mula berusaha dengan lebih gigih lagi untuk mengatasi segala masalah yang ada di negara tercinta ini. Sayangilah rakyat kita sendiri, mereka semua mempunyai hak untuk disayangi, dididik dan dijaga dengan rapi.

Lihatlah masalah kita dan berfikir dan berusahalah untuk memulihkannya. Jangan asyik bangga dengan kejayaan kita sahaja.

Selamat ulang tahun ke lima puluh kemerdekaan Malaysia.

Consider an image with 400 pixels in width and 300 pixels in height, and each pixel can have 65536 different colors. Or 16-bit color depth if you prefer. This picture width is used in most of my thumbnails here. With this picture size, we can practically picture everything imaginable.

By considering that an image like this as a base-65536 number, we can find the number of possible images we could generate. The following output from octave program gives the base-10 logarithm of the possible number of images that could be generated, or in other words, its order of magnitude. For example, 10000 gives 10¹⁰⁰⁰⁰ number of ways. You should know how to read scientific notation as given by most computer programs using ‘e’ notation.


octave:6> (400*300)*log10(65536)
ans = 5.7798e+05
octave:7> (400*300)*log10(256)
ans = 2.8899e+05
octave:8> (400*300)*log10(16)
ans = 1.4449e+05
octave:9> (400*300)*log10(2)
ans = 3.6124e+04


The extra 3 calculations are just my curiosity to see the number of possibilities if we use 8-bit (256 colors), 4-bit (16 colors) and 2-bit (monochrome) color depth instead. Especially for the first two, we still can picture things clearly.

As expected, these numbers are very large. Engineers would say that it is practically infinite. But the mathematicians don’t care. They say it is still finite, possibly we could define a larger number by just simply adding at least one into it.

If you try to follow all the possibilities in sequence, like going from 0000 to 9999 in numerical sense, you will inevitably:

• Witness your own fate.
• Witness the final fate of the universe.
• Seeing how your future looks like, the family picture of your future spouse and future kids.
• Witness the fate of a certain country.

And the list goes on. There are too much possibilities, but you do not know which one. Whatever it is, you already have passed by one of them. At least macroscopically, don’t need to be in fine detail, or you would need even bigger image size, but it would still be finite.

Does quantum mechanics involve in this? Since if you know the final fate at last, we have something like ‘wavefuntion collapse’ …

Or you could be the most sucessful inventor, because you will also inevitably:

• Uncover the theory of everything? Since we can arrange every possible wordings when we picture texts.
• Invent almost everything.

And the list will go on again. Life in this world is very finite indeed.

It happened again, now with 21 lives lost at the time of writing. Perhaps I don’t need to elaborate further as it’s all in the news, and even in Wikipedia.

But whatever it is I am very disappointed when I look at the offences done by Malaysian drivers. Not only there are plenty, but the fact that those summonses can be checked via SMS, can be paid at shopping malls, existence of plenty of advertisements and promotions on services where you can check your summonses and pay for them, et cetera, looks like that those summonses are almost commercialized. What I mean is that doing traffic offences is more like a commercial product for me rather than punishment.

I think people don’t appreciate why such rules are in place. I also this could be an insult to engineers as well who designed those rules for safety. Maybe this is what is meant by ‘tidak-apa’ attitude, as always stressed by my form 1 and 2 history teacher.

This could be one of the reason why I reluctant (and yes I admit now: afraid) to learn to drive in Malaysia. Instead, I am more inclined to drive trains and pilot planes instead because I admire the good-disciplines involved. Everytime I play train simulation, I will be very disappointed when I know that I have exceeded speed limits even at 5 km/h more. It is even more embarassing if the penalty brakes kicks in. When I play flight simulation, I will be in a very bad mood if I fly above 250 knots below 10,000 feet or fly above flaps placard speeds at any flaps position.

Picture from The Star.

UPDATE: Looks like I am blaming the driver. Although the realities of today’s driver discussed above are real, for this incident, various other things have to be looked at, such as operation, maintenance, engineering, safety, etc.

I love walking in the night, especially in rural or forest areas.

I remember when I was in kampung, walking with the villagers to the mosque or other relatives’ houses. Besides for having some spiritual refreshments and to strengthen ties and kinship among villagers, walking in the night offers you peace and quiet, a lovely environment for you to meditate, refresh, and think.

I hope I could do that with my friends, especially in Cambridge countryside here, but most of them will call me crazy. So sad.

I love text mode. Maybe because when I first saw a computer, it is running in text mode. So strage, it gives me spirit to learn things in very strange ways.

I love Linux. As many hackers would say, it contains a lot of toys for me to learn.

And yes, nowadays, text mode alone is not practical anymore. For example, when working with pile of hard-to-decipher data, one needs to get into graphics mode anyway and graph it, for easier visualisation.

This is where the problem comes in. Linux is a multi-user system, and the switching of display modes require higher privileges that usually normal user don’t have it. This makes text mode programs hard to use when one-shot graphics mode are needed. Not like DOS, where I can change graphics mode at will, for example, using interrupt 10h in IBM PC and compatibles.

I do not accept answers like running the text mode programs in xterm under X Windows and output the graphical stuff on it. I can say that I’m a text mode purist and I want native text modes.

The best thing I could do is set the DISPLAY environment and dump the graphics output to running X server on the same machine anyway, but that is not appealing. Perhaps I could use svgalib but programs must be setuid root for this and it’s a security risk. Maybe we should write a new Linux console terminal driver that provides commands to do some low-level graphics mode switching. Any other good suggestions? I know many will fume about portability issues since I understand cross-terminal working is important.

Don’t panic. This is not the last day of my blog.

This is my last day in Jesus College, as a Corpus Christi College student. A rare opportunity indeed to live in different college. But I think I wasted a lot of opportunity here in Jesus:

• Lived near to Midsummer Common, the gateway to the East of Cambridge, and I have just repaired my bicycle in the middle of Easter Term.
• I don’t really mix with people here. Sorry for being too shy.
• Lived just beside the tennis courts but don’t have any companion to play tennis.
• Being in closest proximity to CURPC (shooting club) shooting range but no determination to go.
• Not going to Jesus College’s library much. Perhaps my room in North Court here is too comfortable. I typed this in Library’s Kwok Room on my last midnight, which is the first and the last time I went to the library at the middle of the night, the thing I used to do in Corpus last year. And it’s so peaceful indeed.
• Or walking around the peaceful college garden at night… and living up the nights here spiritually. Again too comfortable to lie down and sleep instead.
• Aaron Singh would kill me if he read all these.

I think my Internet addiction is partly responsible for these too…

And as usual, as a human, on the last day, mixed emotions. Standing in the balcony overlooking the tennis courts and diminishing twilight, thinking. Sad, regret, also with some relief, thankful… But life must go on. Tomorrow morning I’m off to Geneva for my summer school in CERN. Hopefully I don’t waste my time there.

I feel thankful to God because all of these actually taught me about my real weaknesses and how to appreciate things. I always feel that I really need someone to educate and accompany me in my life so that it would not go wasted. But most importantly I realize that I need to brush up my own motivational spirit to take up all the opportunities from all the time I had anywhere.

The same thing for next year, inevitably, the last day of my time here in Cambridge will eventually come. Hopefully with much lesser regrets.

And also for sure, the last day of my life will eventually come too. But of course, the problem is I do not know when. And regretting at this time is not a good idea, which also mean that your life has failed miserably.

I pray to my God that this type failure will not happen.

Went to Arctic Norway for one week, and this is what I have learnt:

• 20-hour train ride, although fun, can be tiring.
• Norway is an expensive country. My father have warned me. As a consequence…
• … you REALLY need a good job to survive nowadays, like what my friend have said to me. But at least I should do better planning next time.
• My blurriness and my lack of common sense make even more manifest to me. My family used to tease me about this.
• North of Arctic Circle doesn’t mean you will get Arctic climate, but I have already expected this.
• Even through the sun is up 24 hours a day for 2 months, people here still strictly adhere to usual timings, which means that you will still get stuck if you arrive here in the middle of the night even with bright sun. Luckily this hasn’t happened to me.
• The most important is that I managed to join the Friday prayer in Tromsø mosque, which claims to be the northernmost mosque in the world, and the sermon is all about Fitnatul-nisaa’, or the temptations of women, and the whole sermon is in Arabic, where I cannot fully understand. Thinking that I have come all the way to the Arctic to get to hear about this, I believe that this should be a divine sign for me that this is an important issue. In fact, I have already experienced it for real; a bitter experience indeed. I should study more about this, thinking what I have done wrong, and the need to be extra careful. Hopefully I could share with you all someday, if I have confidence.

Perhaps most of you who know me know my fondness to computers and electronics toys.

But maybe you are wondering why I more interested in seeking education and careers in physics and natural sciences rather than engineering.

Well, it all have to do with the way I enjoy learning things, by toys. Physics and modern science require state-of-the-art toys which are only available in large research institutions and large industry and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to home brew them.

While for electronics, I can easily order things from electronics shop and doing them all at home. Also, for things like VLSI design all I need is just a computer and a suitable software. But unfortunately, the software are all proprietary and expensively licensed to serious industry without giving chance for a learning person like me. Good thing there are open source alternatives like gEDA and Electric, and I hope that these will mature quickly. This means that I better use universities and careers for my pursuit for natural sciences and utilize my hobby for my pursuit in electronics.

And I think that electronic engineering knowledge is important for me too for appreciating the engineering of large toys used in research labs used in science.