Kenny's Cafe Corner

Name the Mystery Fish at Cryptomundo.com
Here's for the XPhile in all of us. Check out the other links at this site on Cryptozoology. I've always been fascinated by the Chupacabras...

The Star Online : TechCentral - Malaysia Technology
Hear ye! Hear ye! I fully support the idea of banning cellphone use by students too young to afford wasting time texting (SMS) each other. I have the personal experience of my students being overly distracted by this technology.

However, I can also understand the reason why parents buy mobile phones for their children. Surely it would be convenient to able to reach their children with just a few button presses and vice versa.

So here's an idea. Listen up cellphone makers, you can design and market KID-FRIENDLY CELLPHONES.

These phones should be targeted at children between the ages of 7 and 17.
Suggested features should be:

1. The phone can only call and be reached by 5 pre-programmed phone numbers. The idea is that the phone will only be used to call absolutely only the most important people such as parents, guardians, emergency etc. That way the user (children) won't waste too much time using the phone for unimportant calls and SMSes.

2. The settings of the phone can only be modified by their parents. Have it password protected or something, once the parents set the limited address book.

3. The kid-friendly phone should be colorfully hip so as not to appear too untrendy for the younger crowd.

4. Kid-friendly phones should have built in geo-positional tracking features. Parents should be able to call a number provided by the service and hear a computer generated voice speak out the area of where this phone is. This area could be the 'cell' area or with a charge, they may even track down the latitude and longitude coordinates accurate down to 10 meters using triangulation of base stations. This should be a poor man's form of GPS.

5. Parents should be able to control the availability of on-board games in the phone.

6. Provide a service whereby places such as schools and libraries could install a transmitter that sends out a signal of a radius of 10 meters all round to tell all such kid-friendly phones to automatically switch to silent or vibrating mode. These specially designed phones will detect such signals and go 'stealth' but return to its former state once they are out of such 'dead zones'.
Hmmm, does this feature constitute electronic jamming? Such jamming technology could be illegal by Malaysian law though.

There, the kids can complain all they want but it is the parents' prerogative to purchase such limited phones for their children's use.

How about this idea Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola and all other cellphone makers out there?

DTMF also known as Touch Tone
Ever wonder how those sounds in a touch tone phone works?
This is work-related knowledge but I'm posting it here coz I know my geek/nerd friends might wanna know too...
:p

Robbie Williams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
To all Robbie Williams fans out there, of which I am one, here's a fascinating look at the eccentric nutcase!

About that infamous 'Rock DJ' mtv, I kinda liked it. The shock factor actually made perfect sense to me!

Aeon Flux Movie - Official Site: AeonFlux.com
MTV's Aeon Flux is going into silver screen! Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the movie will have the tv show's dark humor of having its heroine die over and over again.
Nevertheless, Charlize Theron is looking mighty fine indeed!

Citizen Magazine Feature - Hitting the Mark
So Hollywood's returning to its roots of making Christian-themed movies. I wonder how many people realize that the 'Chronicles of Narnia' are actually Christian stories in disguise?

From the Atheistic East - Gizmodo
Non-denominational DVD player. Engrish, Japlish whatever! It's funny.

Optical Illusions Etc: free, scary, word & picture illusions
This is the site map of an illusions blog that people post up. Don't get distracted by the other links and adverts, just scroll down to the links in the site map section.
Of note:

For the life of me, I can't figure out what is happening here.

And here's an extremely neat Flash enabled illusion.

Telltale Games - Sam and Max
Some of the team members from the cancelled LucasArts Sam n Max game just formed their own company. Even better, they bought the rights to the Sam And Max license and will be producing new media based on the two hilariously mischievous characters.
Hooray!
There's also a trial game for free download at this site.

fansincostume_intro
Softcore porn for Star Wars geeks?

The Museum of Unworkable Devices
A Perpetual Motion machine is by definition a machine that will go on forever without requiring input of energy from an external source. Which is impossible since it violates physical laws, which is just how the universe works.
So here's a fascinating look at some of the Perpetual Motion machines proposed in the past and a detailed answer of how it cannot work.

Physics has always been my favorite branch of science!

Kill Bill's Browser - Switch to Firefox
A truly creative and funny website. 'nuff said!

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
A very long and intriguing essay on Microsoft's Visual Studio software development suite.

A programmer's most common bane is the deadline. Unlike other professions with similarly timed ultimatums, programming under pressure is generally a bad idea since mistakes, no matter how tiny, are extremely costly to the project's success. Even if less bugs are produced, the quality of the code churned out is usually poorly structured and there'll be hell to go through when trying to maintain the source code in the future.

The software market is such that there's a high demand for rapid development so it comes as no surprise that Microsoft is working towards making Visual Studio write more code for you than ever.

However, is there a price to pay for getting lazy and letting the development environment do most of the coding for you? That's what the essay in the link above is all about as Charles Petzold wonders if this is actually a good thing. Especially since most of the automatically generated code perpetuates bad programming practices, ways of thinking and makes the programmer lazier.

So the dilemma here is, should we get the job done as quick as possible or should we encourage intellectual sloths?

It's a tough choice. One that I'm not entirely sure the answer to. After all, you have to get the job done in time and please let the poor programmer have a life! Still, doing so might actually produce horrible code that will be unmaintainable in the long run.

Ah, the challenge of programming!

DotNetNuke Blogs - No Respect for Windows Open Source
A blog post onwhat has always peeved most of us Microsoft platform developers. That open source projects based on the Microsoft platform does not get enough attention or respect from the rest of the OSS community.

I'm Back!
And I so missed this blog! Last week was almost a whole week off for the Deepavali and Hari Raya holidays so I was mostly either too bummed out from work or was out of town without Net access.

All I can say was my four days back to my hometown of Ipoh was much needed even though my dad kept asking why I still have to answer work related phone calls. Sigh!

It was nearly 3 months since I was last back so this time I was determined to be the filial son, bringing flowers to my mom's grave the day after All Soul's day (left Kay Elle one day late thanks to work again), talking (whoa! talking you say?!) to my dad, and getting a little bit of repairs done to my poor aging ailing car.

My colleagues wanted to visit the Six Mile Tunnel in Perak so I mentioned to my dad that some of them might be staying overnight at our Ipoh place. He's very familiar with Perak though he never heard of a 'Six Mile Tunnel'. The next day he drove us to 'Gua Tempurung' instead, just to help me scout ahead for some interesting outdoor activities that my over-active co-workers might be itching to try. Me? I'm perfectly happy staying home and vegetating during the holidays.

Anyway, 'Gua Tempurung' is a limestone cave that is one of the more commercialized tourist spots around the Kinta Valley in the state of Perak. There are lots of limestone hills near my hometown and since limestone is soft and easily eaten away by rain water, caves are aplenty.

Gua Tempurung is cleaner and better managed these days, at least compared to the awful state of the place the last time I was there some six years ago. The price of all this is of course the exorbitant entrance fee the management charges for 4 different tours of the place. The more strenous and interesting the course, the higher the charge. So what do you say guys, wanna go there sometime? I've no doubt you masochists wouldn't mind paying for the 'grand tour' of 3 and a half hours.

Then we took a stroll through old Kampar town looking for some 'Kai Chai' biscuits which the place is so famous for. Erm, i think 'Kai Chai' literally translates to 'Chicken Little', which coincidentally is the name of a cute Disney movie!

I realized how metropolitan I've become when I found myself proclaiming how 'quaint' the whole little town is. There's the musty old style 'kedai runcit' grocery store, the dry rotting smell of decades old thread from an old embroidery/craft store, the 'kopitiam' restaurants with yellowing marble tables and rickety chairs, the stinging smell of curry spice from a mamak store...the list of quaintness goes on and on.

It's on the way back to our parked car, after buying some Kampar 'Kai Chai' biscuits that I noticed the modern businesses where all the youngsters convene noisily. These are the air-conditioned cafes and some even brought their PC notebooks in an attempt to appear sophisticated. I said 'attempt' because I highly doubt they have broadband Net access in such a rural area and what's the point of bringing your laptop along if there's no Wi-Fi?
Ah! How snobbish I've become!

After that we stopped by Pulai to check out some show houses. There are some really impressive and spacious semi-detached houses for sale. Of course, I wouldn't dare look at the price tag for the place but hey, it's nice to dream of being rich every once in a while eh?

It's the monsoon so the days of that week were blessed with blistering hot afternoons and chilly evenings pouring with rain. It was approaching evening so we stopped by a nearby 'Kopitiam' for some coffee and tea. Once again, I noticed the quaintness of the place as 'toddy' was served. The locals enjoy this alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of the coconut tree. Dad said all you had to do was climb up the tree and cut off the young shoot and the liquid would spurt out ready for collection. I've had toddy before and I enjoy the sweetness of the drink but couldn't stand the stench of fermentation. Perhaps that's why some of the folks mix toddy with equal parts of Guinness.

Well, that's all I have to say about my day out with my father. There's more to tell but this blog entry is already too long.

Sigh. Back to work everybody! At least until Christmas...