Philip Khor

It is almost a month since Windows 7 was officially released. Leaked copies of the final version has been out for over 2 months. So, how was my experience?

5 major points I’d like to make.

1. Conflicts with some programs. I had an old version of Kaspersky. It caused my installation to be extremely buggy and unusable. Credit to them though for releasing a fix within days.

2. ReadyBoost (as described earlier elsewhere) is a godsent! You’ll notice signficicant boost in general performance by plugging in a Thumb drive and dedicating it for cache disk duties. The responsiveness is just breathtaking.

3. This is truly a multitasker. Past versions prior to Win 7 had terrible multitasking performances. Run an antivirus scan and your PC is basically useless. The code has been optimised and the core handles all your requests in small threads (pretty much like Mac OS X since its inception in 7 years ago!). Microsoft has finally caught up!

4. Everything works out of the box. With a Win XP installation, you won’t have Network connection or audio for example. You need the CD to get started. Win 7 includes basic drivers to save you the headache (at least for my setup!)

5. Try this. Open all 6 programs in Microsoft Office 2003 in one go. Chances are, you’ll take 4-5 seconds. On Win 7, it takes half the time! The programs are ready to use as soon as you click on the icons.

My first test went well. I needed a miracle, and I think I got it (gotta wait til mid Dec to find out). Here is an article related to my studies which is interesting to read:

http://www.ceaconline.org/pdf... [link]

In today’s fast paced world, change is imminent. In order to gain an advantage, you gotta “change” the Players, Added Value, Rules, Tactics and Scope of the Game.

Another article worth a look is the Holy Bible translated in Lolcat language! [link here and here]

I think its an internet phenomena / meme. If you go to Youtube, you can find cats do all sorts of crazy stuff, including playing an organ! They’re so “cute and adorable” thats why any cat related jokes are damn viral!

I’m using Google Desktop and Google Chrome now. Chrome has seen much improvements. And speed wise, its the best. Every tab is a different process. This means multi-core systems will see significant boost in speed! Give Chrome a try [link]

It is a beautiful Wednesday!

Here it is, my moment of Zen :)

A tribute.

[11pm update]
Locus Iste – sung by angels in heaven. I’m serious
[youtube link]

Digg Article worth reading [link]

There are many people who should not be going to expensive colleges/universities to get degrees – you don’t need a degree in General Studies, Women’s Studies, etc, etc. That’s what this article is addressing (though in a sort of round-a-bout way).

However, if you’re going to be an engineer, doctor, lawyer, or other highly skilled professional which requires higher education and brings with it a significant increase in pay over not having a degree.

Just pokered.

This 50 Million $ ranking bugger raised me all in, 22k.. nothing to lose, I went ahead.

I had 10, Q.

Flopped a full house, rivered Quads!

This sort of shit makes me addicted to Genting. dammit you gambling gods!

Bad beat for today:

I went for meetings with the Engineers from Taylors, and later the career services officer. It was quite productive, although I put the chances of successful partnership within 30 days at 50/50. Not very optimistic, Its fun to see how businessman works, especially when they’re selling stuff.

As a business student, we are NOT that gullible, still we get interested whenever someone has some shit to offer.

Anyway, will go by TRAIN to Singapore and arrive 7am Friday morning. Then its phun philled phatventure! Hope they got iPhone to play with.

I can’t get roaming, so I won’t be reacable :( Might twit once in a while, so stay tuned!

Just a plug to the new lukasfoo.com

Construction in progress, but sexciting things to come.

Had a good game of bowling with Patrick and Lukas. Lukas came out tops today (Won’t be surprised to find picture evidence of this).

Had a fun time accompanying him to make passport at Subang Airport Terminal 2. Queue was ok. And yes, we had 1901 hotdogs.

Still contemplating whether to go Genting next weekend instead of Singapore. There’s a Texas Hold’em tournament, and Darrel has accomodation. If I can raise the RM 500 + lodging & transport needed, I will participate also. Just for the experience.

Ok, off to CG now.

If you ask me to vomit out all that I learnt from this subject called “Internet Commerce” over the past 14 weeks, I could put everything I “think” I learnt in one sheet of A4 paper. Yes, this is how little we’ve learnt.

I think they purposely put RC Ho to teach us because on the surface, this is not a very important subject. It is just there to add credit points for us to graduate. But don’t get me wrong, I’ve learnt the MOST in this class in terms of social skills, organisational skills, man management, psychology, public relations, communication and presentation skills. Yupp.

Its not in the course objectives. Its a by-product of a well crafted syllabus. Kudos Taylors Business School admins.

Its kinda like the “unintentional safety” that most intermediate pool players execute once in a while.

I really thank RC Ho for all he hath done. We need more lecturers like him to really shape us for the working world. Lousy lecturers impart facts. Traditional lecturers impart knowledge. RC imparts wisdom.

The people at Twitter sent me an email confirming my suspecion as to why I was suspended. Yes, my philipkhor.com was serving malware last month and I twitted my site. Nevertheless, when restored I’ll redirect traffic to my new @philipkhor account. [check Social media links]

This morning, my trap worked. I had pocket 5s and flopped a set. On-the-gun, I checked and there was a bet, raise and re-reraise. Turn card, I all-in and yes this time it worked. I’m now at 30k chips.

After today I would have 2 subjects left in college. Once completed, I can reward my dad with a well deserved retirement… like he’s been working to kill time and fight boredom, yes… but partly also to fund my Toto addiction (as some close friends may know!) hahaha…

Lets see Melvyn can remember our appointment to go gym at 9.30am. I highly doubt it, but he’ll surprise me! Oh, I’ll be going to Singapore next Thursday. Woooot~!

It has been a great 4 years in Subang, helped by great college friends such as Lukas, Melvyn and Kathryn. Church helps too with the likes of Yang Wei, Mark and Patrick. “As we go on, we remember, all the times we, had together. And as our lives change, from whatever, we will still be, friends forever.” [youtube | lyrics]. Check out Obama Swats a fly [Youtube] and I’m a Boss [YouTube] & Microsoft is getting desperate [Digg]

Wow. I was surfing through some facebook groups and comments. It is interesting to see that a lot of people seem to know quite a lot of stuff, whether philosophy, sciences, arts, humanity, life and relationships. You see one comment, you see 100 refutes. Even if I start a topic on “systematic dicotyledonous demarcation of UTP based connections”, or “sodomization of unidentified 256-bit encapsulated packets over authenticated network zone in 802.11 multinomial multihomed environment”.

The pressure to impress is tremendously HUGE these days.

Like when I was playing basketball with Aidan and Patrick, we wanted to show what we’ve got. We got tapao-ed by noobs, missing easy points and shooting long range like Shaq O Neal!

In pool, everybody wants to BEAT Melvyn. Whatever it takes, whatever concentration levels that is required (that will cause us to go crazy), we still play at our highest level. In a  Pippo v Patrick game, the competitive level goes down. Miss simple shots, make crazy shots. The victor will just say, ‘oh, yeah… [smiles]“. But if you beat Melvyn in a race to 5 game, you go do the dance, you treat your friends to shots of your favourite Vodka or JD, make the DJ play poker face on repeat, fist pump and twit about it~!

The human mind is the hardest to decipher. The f

Here are the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list will be drawn for June 2009. Expect the charts to be shifted when performance across the top 10 increases over 10% every 6 months!

TOP 10 Systems – 11/2008
1     Roadrunner – BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz , Voltaire Infiniband
2     Jaguar – Cray XT5 QC 2.3 GHz
3     Pleiades – SGI Altix ICE 8200EX, Xeon QC 3.0/2.8 GHz
4     BlueGene/L – eServer Blue Gene Solution
5     Blue Gene/P Solution
6     Ranger – SunBlade x6420, Opteron QC 2.3 Ghz, Infiniband
7     Franklin – Cray XT4 QuadCore 2.3 GHz
8     Jaguar – Cray XT4 QuadCore 2.1 GHz
9     Red Storm – Sandia/ Cray Red Storm, XT3/4, 2.4/2.2 GHz dual/quad core
10     Dawning 5000A – Dawning 5000A, QC Opteron 1.9 Ghz, Infiniband, Windows HPC 2008

To put in numbers, the number 1 supercomputer has a rated peak performance of 1,456,704 Gigaflops (billlions of floating point operations per second). To put in perspective, a modern 2GHz Core2Duo pumps out 10 Gigaflops of processing power (assuming the software is optimised). That makes this supercomputer about 150,000 TIMES faster! Isn’t that insane?

Nuclear simulation models which would take 2000 years to complete on a single Core 2 Duo will now be computed in 5 days, paving way for many new exciting discoveries.

Which brings me to, innvoation. Back when computers were non existent, the human race produced the most interesting and significant discoveries and works of art. Things like, electricity, gravity, Mozart, Bethoven, Mona Lisa, tall towers that actually stood up against teh forces at that time.

Once the “computer” became popular in the 80s and mainstream by the turn of the millenium, whoa… we started becoming less innovative and creative. We argue over where to eat, what twitter / facebook short vanity URLs we want (I’m guilty of domain whoring too), whether to buy a car with 148 Horsepower or 155 HP, whose turn is it to break in a game of pool, and all that! So rediculous lah~!

People are scared of accountability. People do not want to take responsibility.

Example: If we want to go Penang in July, you let the Penang people choose where to eat and what to do. At the end of the trip you say, “Aiyah.. you recommend all the lousy place wan, so dirty, so smelly, so expensive.”, I TOLD YOU we should have gone [there and there]. What the cock~!”

Or in an assignment, your idea gets rejected and the marks your group get is below average. You point fingers. In most cases, the guy who points fingers and makes accusations is the one who either contributes the least, or is the reason why the group failed. Even though my part is 100% correct and that you are the weakest link, it is just not logical to argue about who is wrong. Doesn’t make any good.

I agree with Patrick that “you learn more from your mistakes and failures”. A company exec said in a talk, “In the interview, I ask the employee, how have you failed before? And if he haven’t yet fail, I’ll say – Go work and fail first, then apply to join my company again”.

A friend gave me a copy of The Painted House – John Grisham as a birthday gift back in high school. I misplaced it. Now I borrow one from the library, because I never got past Chapter 1. Hehehhe….. Also planning to read Early Civilizations of South East Asia and Law Contract!

Oh, if you’re curious to what the above two phrases meant, and started Wiki-ing for an answer; don’t bother. They’re both BS statements I created trying to mimic the explanation of BitTorrent and hacking online backing over Wifi! Have a nice day!

A piece of TechCrunch:

As you no doubt heard last night, the whole Facebook vanity URL grab thing was big. Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 345,000 users grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told Bloomberg. But who got the best one.

The best one I’ve seen by far, was grabbed by Christine Shipley of San Francisco. Rather than go for facebook.com/christine.shipley or even facebook.com/shipley, she went with facebook.com/default.aspx. Yes, her name could easily be confused as the default landing page for Facebook. (Though, savvy users will know that the site is actually built in PHP, and not ASP, which the .aspx extension suggests).

Numero Uno. Christine….

Phailed Mix June 09 is almost done. I’ve shortlisted these songs, with 2-3 more extra as “surprise” when the final mix is out. Check it out, ya’ll!

Busy Day today! But exciting as always~!

Ok, I need a small favour from  you guys. Go to Google.com and search for “Khalij Petroleum”. That’s its. Your help is much appreciated.

Ok, So I got Ace-9.

Flop Ace-8-9. Hmmm… this is a big table, 100k buy-in. 4 other big guns loaded, I’m first to act, or under-the-gun as they call it. Worst position, but hey, I got good cards, right?

I check. And it checked around the table!

Turn card was a Queen. Scary card. Again, out of position, I checked. No one played, 1 folded, perhaps couldn’t take the pressure!

River was 6. All different suits, so no chance of a flush draw. Someone raise all-in 4,000. Next player re-raised 50,000. I was so freaking confident I committed all my 100,000 chips all-in (Melvyn gave). Turns out my two pairs was beaten by a Set of eights. Dammit.

So depressed now. Waiting for a Pool table at Club 9, no action. Tomorrow’s a Sunday; and I plan to take time off my busy week. Every day, its eat-sleep-exam-yum cha-pool .. you know, the typical routine.

Went to Bangsar for some Chinese food. And yes, my photo stream works now. See if Maxis comes up with a better data plan, cheaper.. or else each photo will cost me RM 1? Argh..

Whoa, its mid June already. Gotta lay out my plans and schedule for the remainder of the months. If not, my life will be wasted away in nothingness. Anybody up for doing some crazy shit? Like Genting, all-in our life savings? OK lah, Penang trip it is… at a “safe” speed ok, Lukas?

See how Patrick tomorrow come back from Penang. And Jeniffer coming back from Semenyih. But there’s Salsa class at 6pm at the GYM tomorrow. And lunch, Manhattan Fish Market! Wootzah!

Ok, I did a server transfer and to make things short, a lot of cool stuff was lost between 9-12 June 2009. Instead of bitching about it to my server guy (who has been extremely helpful during this transition), I’ll just let bygones be bygones.

I’ll do a cleanup of this blog this weekend, God willing, the site will be in full swing by Monday. Exams so far was great. Will be able to pass, no problem! Now to tackle the IT subjects.

Follow me at http://twitter.com/philipkhor

I watched Drag me to Hell with Melvyn. It was terrible. I don’t like Horror, but according to Melvyn, Thai horror flicks are even more gory. I left the cinema but came back for the ending. Went to Thai Express at the Curve for the expensive dessert.

I’ll be gymming soon, then try to find some cheap food. Really short on cash now.

Ta!