Vii is out now !

Yes it's the 威力棒 Vii, not the Nintendo Wii. Our super distant relatives have done it again. After reverse engineering CPUs, mobile phones, cars and a whole chunk of stuff, the world's factory now give us the 威力棒 Vii !

The Chinese guys must have spotted a potential market when the over priced and perpetually unavailable Nintendo came back in 2006. The resulting gaming knockoff looks and plays like the Nintendo Wii, including the star feature, the motion sensor controllers.

However, apart of that, the Vii isn't a outright clone of the original. The most glaring difference is the lack of compatibility with Nintendo Gamecube and Nintendo Wii games. It doesn't seem to have a optical drive, so I assume that it uses cartridge of sorts for games. It do come with some built in games right out of the box.

This also signifies that the the Vii has it's own software and hardware architecture, and basically, it stole the appearance and input controller from the Nintendo Vii. From what it seems to me, it's just a proprietary console made in China that doesn't offer any additional games yet. So for the China folks, this knockoff will be a good and cheap substitute of the real thing, since the little kids are unlikely to be able to tell the difference anyway. Since there is already a library of games built-in, and Nintendo Wii games are largely a load of crap anyway, the Vii indeed makes a nice alternative.

The Vii is so new that there is none posted in eBay yet and no pricing information available. I doubt any of the Vii will land in Singapore, so don't bother to wait for it.

Original Article from Engadget

PSP Buying Tips

I just got a PSP recently, and it's keeping me and my sisters happy. After going through the process of buying and getting it to work, here is the FAQ for buying a PSP if you intend to do so. So you guys didn't have to go through all the sweat and pain that I encountered.

As a warning, this FAQ contains information that might brick your PSP if you are not careful, do don't blame me for your own actions.

1. So what to buy ?
   Buy the latest model, PSP Slim & Light. It comes in many colours and designs, starting from $250 w/o GST. Don't ever get into buying the older PSP. The new PSP is 2/3 the weight of the old model and 5mm thinner, which makes it better to hold.
   
   
2. Can play chiong games or not ?
   Can. But you have to mod your PSP first. Unlike your Xbox 360 and PS2, you are only required to flash the ROM on your PSP. For the PSP slim, it currently version 3.71 M33. Most shops are willing to do it for $20 or you can google and DIY. It will also allow you to do a lot more with the PSP with homebrew applications.
   
   
3. Where to get the games ? Free or not ?
   Games ? It's all over the internet via Bittorrent. For those who haven't BT before, it's time to start. There is no need to pay for any of the PSP sites which offers paid download content.There is no need to buy any UMD games to make the downloaded games work as the M33 custom firmware has a good work around for games that checks for a UMD.
   
   
4. How many games can it hold ?
   The largest memory stick pro duo available is 4GB for around $86 from Sandisk. That's around 10 games. I got mine from Best Bargain at Sim Lim Square.
   
   
5. Battery can tahan how long ?
   Approximately 3 to 4 hours for me.
   
   
6. Still got accessories to buy?
   Got. Buy the screen protector. It will be worth the money sooner than you thought it would. The rest of the accessories are just crap and useless most of the time. I personally like the PSP slim without the plastic casing or silicone skin.
   
   
7. 1 player game no fun lah
   There are many games which allows peer to peer competitive play via WiFi.
   
   
8. Got WiFi ? Meaning can go surf net at MacDonalds ?
   I couldn't get Wireless.sg to work on my PSP because of the way it needs to store cookies on the web browser. However, normal WiFi networks work fine. The strange implementation of the PSP keyboard can be frustrating too.
   
   
9. What else can it do ?
   You can convert a whole bunch of videos to PSP format and use it as a video player. I got a colleague who's friend used it as portable cartoon player for his kids. Loading up the kid;s favorite cartoons on the PSP seems to save him a lot of pain. For me, I installed emulators on it to play old games and some applications to spice things up.
   PSPGenesis - SEGA Megadrive emulator
   NesterJ - Nintendo emulator
   Snex9xTYL - SNES emulator
   
   
10. Can you help me to mod, give me games, and install stuff for me ?
    No. Unless you are a chio bu, single and available.

Devil's guide to the movies - Resident Evil : Extinction

This post will mark the first time that I will put my evil thoughts into reviewing movies. In my crappy reviews, there will be numerous references to parts of the movie, and thus, you are advised to skip my BS if you actually plan to watch the movie. Why is that so? You are almost guaranteed to watch the movie in a completely different light !

The first victim for my sadistic review is the movie based on a video game, Resident Evil (3) : Extinction. While most game based movies are a load of crap, this zombie flick is actually very nice to watch. While the 28 days/weeks later series took a more serious approach to zombies, Resident Evil takes the action-chick-kickass approach. It does help when the female lead is played by Milla Jovovich as Alice. The director did know his job well. There were plenty of scenes with her naked, scenes showing off her tummy and legs while ignoring her obviously flat chest.

Her character in Ultraviolet was simply a serial killer with a strange dose of motherly instinct but in the Resident Evil series, she became a serial zombie and human killer.

So what's new in this installment ? Every new zombie movie always introduces something new. This time round, we have ...

1. Zombie crows (Zombie dogs aren't new anymore)
2. Intelligent zombies, who can run, climb and have increased strength
3. Super zombie with regenerating powers, telekinesis powers and extended reach (Tyrant)
4. Human survivors who preys on other survivors
5. Zombies don't really need to eat, it's just an instinct (WTF?!)
6. The T-Virus can somehow dry up the earth, turning it into a desert
7. You can install a camera in a human and watch it as a satellite feed in high quality and frame rate (imagine the naughty applications of this technology!)
   

Apparently, jumping is a very important move in the movie. Alice and her clones jumped out of trouble so many times over in the movie that it's better than running or shooting.

Obviously, Milla Jovovich isn't a cheap actress to employ. And to get her to sign her up for the 3rd installment of a successful franchise must have really stretched the movie budget to its limits. How do I tell ? The Umbrella's US massive underground desert base is mostly represented in the form of wire frame models and in the scene where Alice cuddles up her newly released clone, the director couldn't find enough budget for a full CGI Alice and had to resort to using the classic camera trick that shows each Alice's face turn by turn. Only when the two Alices are separated, you can see both Alices' faces which can be accomplished by overlapping scenes, another all time favorite director's trick.

There was also a incredible scene where Claire Redfield drove a oil tanker into a whole load of zombies, ignite some dynamites, a cigarette and blew himself in true martyrdom fashion (also known as suicide bomber in most parts of the world). The oil tanker exploded with a big fireball and soon, I realised that it was physically impossible to do so. Just a few scenes ago, Chase was telling everyone that they had only enough fuel in the tanker to drive a hundred miles, which is hardly enough fuel to start a campfire. So I concluded that the aging oil tanker is made of C4 explosives.

At the start of the movie, I was wondering very hard how the Umbrella guys could bare to let so many Alice clones die without doing the manly THING. Hey ! This is a world where most people had turned into zombies, females are in seriously short supply, and babes are very hard to pass up indeed. Are they all gays? In the entire movie, I didn't remember seeing any female members of the Umbrella.

Add a evil twist to the movie logic to their cloning capabilities, it would have been even better ! You see, Umbrella can clone humans. Alice's genetic information can potentially give a cure because her blood can bond with the T-Virus, so hence I can deduce that her off springs will have a 50-50 chance of having immunity too right ? So with so many Alice clones, Umbrella could have started a "reproduction line", and have fun doing it !!!

Ok, that didn't happen of course. Alice was last showed releasing her own personal massive clone army from the cloning facility, showing that not only Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine could lead a clone army.

It's a great movie to catch, and it probably earned it's NC18 rating from Millia Jovovich's semi naked scenes than the gore from the dying humans and zombies combined. It will probably undergo plenty of cuts before it arrived in DVD and blueray formats, so watch it on the silver screen before it's gone.

Crazy Ang Mo

I haven't write about food for quite sometime. It's not that I am on a diet of instant mee and hence, have nothing to write about. The reality is that I am drowning in work and studies. Now that I ran out of raids to sign up in WoW, I shall share with whoever actually read this blog on a new stall that I have tried with Jia Lun this Tuesday.

Jia Lun first sighted this western food stall online on a forum. It's a hawker stall at Bishan block 272 appropriately named "Crazy Ang Mo". True to it's name sake, it's run by a Australia chap who really knew how to make sales.

For those who are familiar with Botak Jones stall (American), it's the same concept. Basically it's a Caucasian guy fronting a western food stall with locals cooking at the back. The menu was so what similar to Botak Jones. It has mostly burgers, steak, pork chop, and chicken wings. It didn't have soup, but it has pasta, and deserts. The stall owner certainly knew how to be use catchy names for his menu which contains names starting with Ang Mo this and Ang Mo that. Prices is reasonable and affordable.

Taking my first look at his stall, it is certainly well equipped for big business. It has a large LED display showing the queue number, which however, wasn't in use then. Instead, he opted to use his megaphone to broadcast the current queue number being served.

Just a warning to all of you. This guy is a real smooth talker. He will talk people into waiting 30 minutes for their food, upgrading their 80 cents soft serve into a $2.50(?) sundae and changing a "can-be-found-everywhere-in-singapore" pasta to a steak.

I was also one of the big sucker who fell of it. We placed our orders despite his friendly advisory on the waiting time. The ruse of trying out western food sold at a heartland HDB estate at reasonable prices is very appealing indeed. So after paying for our order, we went back to the carpark and put up another hour of parking coupon to ward of the Cisco parking wardens who are insanely active these days.

Things didn't turned out very well for me. We went groceries shopping at Ang Mo, a local supermart, at block 297 and I ended up spending $30 on junk food and instant mee. If not for the 30 min time limit, I could have done even more damage to my wallet. The $90 that I have withdrawn the day before was down to a few red notes already.

Well the 30 minutes estimated waiting time came to about 45 minutes in the end. We order the deluxe version of their burger meal which is a beef burger with a piece of bacon and a slice of pineapple covered in melted cheese. The burger was served with fries. The presentation was eh, just the burger and fries, and it tasted nothing spectacular. The beef patty used was not as good as the Botak Jones version and the food was generally slightly warm, not the piping hot that we were expecting to see for freshing cooked food.

The verdict is, you don't have to come specially to try it out. It's just reasonably priced western food fronted by an Australian guy, cooked by Asian staff, which has a terribly long waiting time on a Tuesday dinner time and didn't look or taste special.

Woah, after writing all this, I really felt that I could have used a few photos which I should have taken during the meal. Felt so weird to be reviewing a food stall without Ang Kong.

Anti-Ang Mo Weirdo on the loose

On my way to work, I have to walk through a bridge linking Harbourfront centre to Harbourfront tower 1. This morning, as I was walking behind a Ang Mo towards tower I, and a dirty and shabby looking 35+ chinese came towards us in the opposite direction. He diverted from his path and came walking towards the Ang Mo.

Guess what, there were no other people on the bridge and this guy just have to came chest to chest with the Ang Mo and snorted really loudly ! That was unbelievably rude ! I was a good 3 metres behind and still hear the sick sounding snorts.

That was a WTF moment. The Ang Mo appeared stunned at his weird behaviour and stood rooted for a second. He turned around, raised his voice at the bloody rude bastard asking what is his problem.

My evil senses alert me of a possible showdown so I decided to hang around for a while longer to kay-po kay-po, hoping for a chance to see a fist fight between the two to start my day. Well you know the saying, happiness must be built on someone else sorrow, and what's the chance of watching a chinese guy fighting against a Ang Mo ? Will it be Bruce Lee style ending where a chinese guy can hum-dum a Ang Mo to tears?

No !!! That was not to be. The chinese guy turned around, and looked at the Ang Mo with a confused look, obviously unable to comprehend the Ang Mo's words or maybe even the situation. I couldn't tell if he did it on purpose but the Ang Mo decided to let it go. My adrenaline fix was denied by the ball-less Ang Mo. So I continue my way back to the office to start another boring day.

The boring day was given a glimpse of hope when my colleague told me that there was a group 2 winner who bought a system 7 Toto ticket at the outlet at Seah Inn market. That's 60k !!! I bought a system 7 ticket there !

And so I took out my ticket from my wallet, cross my fingers and started matching the ticket I have bought. The first 2 numbers matched ! That's so exciting ! And then ......

Obviously I didn't win. I will never be so dumb to announce a big win on my blog. I will go nuts from the attention generated...you know the abalone porridge thingy I always joke about. My bad luck continued as usual, and the ticket of hope became a piece of paper reminding me of my jinxed luck.

The new weight loss diet is here !

Sick of all those useless dieting regime that are simply to hard to follow or ineffective ?

The most over looked method is actually the most effective ! It's easy to follow and enjoyable !



Click on this link to see a presentation on this new diet method !

Miracle Beer Diet - The most amazing home videos are here
Kiss goodbye to your yoga classes, exercise regime, Atkins diet, Sonoma diet, Mayo Clinic diet and what nots.

Anyone wants to join me ? It's better if we do it together !

For more stuff on the sexy guy in the picture above here. Videos, pictures etc.

I have gained a new Job Title !

A user in my customer's office gave me a new fitting title for my job role ...

IT Bangladesh Worker !!!


"Dang! Where is my pay raise and bonus ?"

Well it's true. I almost fits the stereotype migrant Bangladesh construction worker profile in some ways. Actually I thought it would be Maria instead...Maria ! Do this. Maria ! Do that. zZzZzZz

IT Support Enginner who needs IT support

For those who works in a reasonably large office will know about the helpful guys running around fixing all your seemingly endless IT problems. Well, for those who knows me, I am one of them, a IT support engineer. They come in various versions, differing in technical strength and public relation skills. I come to know about this guy, who is definitely not cut to be in the industry, but didn't seem to get a hint of the term, "INCOMPETENCE" is, despite obvious signs everywhere pointing to it.
Almost everyday for the 3 months he was with us, I will receive calls for help from him. It wasn't the typical learning questions expected from a new man on the job. Till the end, it's still the same old layman questions. That's when I ponder why I was giving life support a IT support Engineer who was not under my charge and I do not know personally.
Let us take on a little journey on the horrors regarding this guy, which I will use the name "A" to protect his identity. Although keeping his identity secret is a serious disservice to the world, I have to respect his privacy and reputation in case I kana sued.
Here is how he scores in my Super Helpdesk Engineer grading system ...

"A" - Chinese male guy
Technical skill - 1/10 - Did not demonstrate understanding of area of work
IT Knowledge - 1/10 - Fairly less than a average office guy
Internal PR skill - 0/10 - Lost credibility very quickly due to obvious incompetence
External PR skill - 0/10 - Users unwilling to use his help, to the point of being "banned".
Some Damning Incidents
Notebook rollout
When he first came in, he was assigned to oversee two engineers on a notebook upgrading project. By the time I came into the picture, the dateline was already near. I wasn't so happy to see that it was moving slowly and generally done poorly. He didn't pushed the engineers hard enough. It didn't help when the notebook installation and procedure check list was badly done too, which wasn't his fault. The users weren't too thrill to get notebooks that couldn't perform what their replaced notebook can do, thus, many cases were logged to do the patching up for the months that followed.
I put an end to the nonsense and came up with a universal laptop and desktop checklist soon after, which my predecessor didn't bother to spend time on. The 1/2 page of checklist ballooned to 4 pages long. It will not take a genius to make a guess how much damage can 3.5 pages of incomplete instructions do.
Banning by at least 3 users within the first month
Feedback from users weren't great. I went down to the grounds after a month after the IT Assistant Manager asked me to. It didn't take too long before I received some terrible feedback from a VP and 2 other quite influential users. They didn't want A to touch their computers anymore for obvious reasons. This was in line of what the IT AM had told me about. Another ex-IT colleague also gave thumbs down to his overall performance. In order to keep things simple, he was permanently banned from the all VPs or important people there after.
Server down
To the IT infrastructure team, nothing else can be more crucial than a server outrage. Imagine to the horror to one of our administrator who found himself screaming in horror after he dispatched A to the server room in the morning to check out a non-responding server immediately. An hour later, the administrator found it strange that A didn't report in on the status. He made a call to A and was distraught to hear that A had decided to go down later in the afternoon instead. The boils down to two things : he didn't know what is call priority and he ignored an direct order.
Backup
After 3 months on the job, A still couldn't figure out the backup procedures and regime. Tapes were loaded wrongly, and sent to the wrong party. He still have difficulty operating the backup software and the tape libraries that I took less than a week to pick up. And all along, he was still reading the guide that I had created for the new users. Pfftttttt...
Remote access
Because of the large geographic area at the user's site, there is a constant need to use remote access software to ease our strain. By 3 months, I do expect him to know that the remote access software couldn't work with Windows firewall. He called me out of the blue for help at his new workplace. I was curious what could bug him so much so to call me, so I went on to try. After listening to him for a few seconds, I realised that he didn't turn off the Windows firewall, which he should know by heart now. I asked him if he had checked, and he replied that he did. Then on further questioning, I found that he turned off his firewall but not the user's firewall. Now that's lame.
Domino administrator
Again at his new workplace, he ran into problem creating new users in Lotus Notes Domino server and called me for help. For those who don't know, the Domino server is a email server which requires proper training and experience to manage. I was amazed to hear that he was allowed to administrate such a important IT function without either of the requirements. And guess what, he couldn't even create a new email user, a very basic function in Domino server. His description of the steps he took to create the user and the situation was so vague that it was summarised as "I don't know". That was a lost cause. So I bailed out and said I couldn't help him on this.
------------------------
He is really fortunate that he was not in my team. He would have been the first person that I will get rid of for total incompetence. So after 3 months, my customer let him go for the better good. He did make an attempt to come back to the job by applying for a position with my company. When I was asked for my recommendation, I gave my honest opinion and therefore, i wasn't surprise that he was not considered for the position later on. Phew.
[WARNING !!! SHAMELESS PLUG AHEAD !!!]

Come on, not every IT Support Engineer is as professional as I am, right ? Quick head hunt me for your well paying and yet relax job position now !

Some things are better left unknown

Sometimes, it's better to be a dumbass and not realise ...

1) Nobody washes vegetables before cooking
2) There can be extra sources of protein in your meal

While almost finishing my share of vegetables while having dinner with Jia Lun and Kokkai at a hawker centre, i found ...



Yeah, I continue to finish the rest of the food after casting the bug aside. I hope I didn't eat any of these that I didn't spotted.

Consultants ? Experts ? Outsource ?

For many companies, consultants are frequently used to fill in their ranks when their own staff couldn't perform a particular project or task. The consultants are employed mainly because they are the perceived experts in their fields and the companies they represent. Surely you will not go wrong when you are willing spend a small fortune to outsource your project to a team of people from a well known large local IT company ?

So my customer (i am outsourced to my customer's company as help desk support) bought a contact for a team of consultants, team manager and programmers from the large local IT company to start on a software solution project. We provided them a place in my customer's premises and computers for them, and so my helpdesk team assisted as technical support for them.

It didn't take me very long to find that the people who came on board didn't knew anything except for the software solution itself. That means they didn't know about a lot of other things, and how their software interfaces itself with the rest of the world. In other words, it's like being an expert in cooking steamed rice but know nothing else about cookery. Unfortunately, the rice is only part of a meal, and has to be paired with the appropriate dishes to complete the meal.

In the brief interaction time I have with them, they committed so many deadly sins in IT and uttered so much garbage that I found myself resisting really hard to laugh out loud in their faces and strangle them with mouse cords. So the rant begins here, and it might be quite technical for the layman out there.

Most of the story evolves around the apparent team lead of the software engineers, which I will refer to him as "S".

I wish I could do this to relieve my anger

The forgetful software engineers

Local user accounts were created for each of the computers provided to the team of software engineers. S wasn't happy with our standard default password, so he opted for another password which the software engineers conveniently managed to forget every couple of days, causing an account lockout each time. And so we kept unlocking their account several times a week, until I had to stand next to S, as he key in their passwords right after I had unlocked his account.

Guess what, trying to act impressive and stylish, S keyed in his password really fast and wracked the enter key in less than 2 seconds. Windows rejected his password and prompted him to try again. S did the same thing again, and got exactly the same result. He started to get annoyed and started protesting that the password he had just keyed was correct. I noticed the problem and pointed to the CAPS LOCK indicator. It's on. Passwords are case sensitive. It didn't take a miracle to get him to logon successfully on the 3rd attempt.

It didn't stop here. The software engineers still got themselves locked out because they kept entering the wrong passwords. Finally they relented and pasted the password on the LCD monitors they are working on. But it didn't help. They still get locked out every now and then. Hopeless hopeless hopeless.

Bad migration practices

When they didn't understand the existing customised codes in the system which they were trying to migrate, they simply overwrite the portion with their own code ignoring the much needed customisations without backups of the existing codes ! It didn't take long for the end users to find out that their familiar functions creased to work. The ugly consequences involved angry users hunting down the software engineers who had to work from grounds up because there were no codes to fall back on.

Cannot transfer data

While troubleshooting on a user's computer, they decided to save some log files for further analysis. S claimed that they couldn't do so because their thumbdrive didn't work on the Windows 2000 PC and there was no floppy disk drive. My customer's project supervisor told me about this and I was perplexed by S's unfounded claims. I proceeded to demonstrate Windows 2000 ability to support my thumbdrive and pointed to the floppy disk drive on the computer. I could almost imagine my customer's project supervisor tearing S apart when she confront him.

Remote printing

While troubleshooting a printing problem on the PC mentioned above, they wanted to isolate the problem by asking the user to do a test print on another computer. However, they couldn't see a obvious physical parellel printer cable linking the computer and the printer. In other words, the printer is not shared and thus can only be used with the computer in question. My puzzled user came looking for me and I had to go to tell the noobs that the printer is not shared and this can also be checked in the printer settings. Our dear software engineers are not only blind, they also didn't know how to check the configurations of a Windows printer.

Paper type and paper source

On the same printer problem, I had to demonstrate and explain how Windows printing works when I realised that S and his guys didn't understand the concept at all and thus it's no wonder that they couldn't troubleshoot the problem. Because of their ignorance, they couldn't come up with proper test cases and didn't know how to interpret the results. Despite after a couple of rounds of see and tell, they still didn't get it. I finally gave up and told them that obviously, their print job is using the wrong paper type and source. All they have to do is to modify their print job to do that and yet they refused to do so. I asked him to show me the properties page and S couldn't do it. Now not only he does not understand the Windows print system, he don't know things in his own turf too. At this point, I gave up and left them to rot on their own.

Lack of testing : Phase 1

One of the most glaring mistake they made was to go live without going through proper testing. The only tests they made were apparently on their test servers, and they assumed that their code will work flawlessly in production. The rollout included the automated of configuration files to the over 200 machines which spectacularly failed in most of the cases.

I was summoned to help troubleshoot the problem and it didn't take me more than a moment to point out that they not included a crucial updated configuration file. This could have been caught if they had done a limited rollout on a test group. Initially, the deployment team and the software engineers went through with the process of denial, pointing fingers everywhere except for the missing configuration file, until the truth sets in at the end of day one. The fallout took a whole week to clear, wasting much of the helpdesk resources.

Then the kicker came soon after. The application failed completely under VPN (Virtual Pirvate Network). Clearly they have forgotten what I have brought up a week before the rollout : test the software under VPN.

Lack of testing : Phase 2

Apparently they didn't learn. The second phrase of their implementation also failed completely under VPN. This lead to another round of furious troubleshooting which concluded with the disabling of a portion of the software.

However, they couldn't do it right either. The software engineers gave wrong instructions which resulted in chaos. I had to perform overtime at Jurong island to help troubleshoot the problem with no pay till 8.30pm. I wasn't surprised when we found that they actually didn't know how to disable the portion of the software which we figured how to shortly by trial and error. This just displayed their incompetency in their own product and lousy troubleshooting skills.

Customers troubleshooting your product ??? Give me a break !

... and there are many more incidents like those I mentioned. My impressions is that their IT knowledge is at best, on par with normal end users, and thus I cannot assume their technical expertise is of a high level. Their insane rate of spouting nonsense and vain attempts to act professional is really detestable and terribly annoying. I will not be surprised when the project gets slapped and penalised with liquidated damages.

Oh ya, their project manager bailed out early September by quitting his job. Smart move, I will say.

From the looks of things, this fiasco deserves an entry into http://worsethanfailure.com .