kepo-ing Zz85

Some long time since I even visit my own blog, but I’m really happy and grateful to all those who visit, esp. those who check here regularly. I’m not faithful on my site, not to mention other blogs, and thank you to those who link over here even I dont border link to you. Thank you all for all the comments, sometimes I don’t even look, a greater sin than ignoring to reply. Those who are interested in my plugins, thank you again, although I dont have the interest, time, endurance and consistency to carry on any of them at the moment. And yes, I updated the new SK2 (Spam Karma not shop name nor the facial product) to get more accurate spam assination.

A little update on my camp life, I still find guard duties causing me restlessness and dis-orientated-ness. Sometimes I dont even know my dates or days, but I need to get use to things. Understanding and getting along well with people is not simple especially for me with low E.Q. You can please everyone, and for some reasons someone make dislike to for maybe no reason. My campmates education levels range from O’levels (Secondary), ITE, Diploma(Poly), A’Levels (JC). And with my promotion to Coporal, responsibilities and work loads increase.

On my geeky (IT/computers) side of life, I have upgraded to Singnet 1500 after a renewing of contract. Its $58/month, but with 4 months free in this 1 year contract, it averages up to $39/month, not that bad after all. It comes with other free services too, but the catch is if you dont explicitly terminate after the free period, charges come in. On the browser side, I using Opera to surf the net because I still find it the quickest and now opera is free and ad-less. I have too much extensions and scripts in firefox that its slightly slower and consume much memory.

Back to the Title topic of Distractions.

Discussion on how on-board screen distracts attention from driving.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/02/21/2330239.shtml

mynotes:
Gearing towards a centralized processing means a centralised controls and screen.
Engine, Aircon, Seats, Radio, GPS, Computer, TV, Locking System, Sensor, Alert system all comes together on the computer in the car. Might actually means system can be broken easily (single point of failure), or even harder to use, unless good UI is done.

Some projects that I’m been distracted with recently, and sadly never got to do much

1) Blogs and plugin. The content, the template, the plugins..

2) LilyTool.. I’m supposed to work on the NoteVisualiser aspect, allowing user to have a graphical display and input frontend to Lilypond’s syntactical code. But since I have been able to compile Bert’s new parser engine, it sort of hung there.

3) Mobile App I: Since I already started creating a Sudoku application for my nokia phone, I should have touch and finish up with it. However, with the lost of some of my project files and last of patience and time its on hold again.

App II: Pitch producing midlet. I managed to create one, but its UI: display and input needs brushing up.

App III: I’m not very satisfied with the current TODO list. I wanted to create one, but so far its only implemented in brainwaves or in-fact more dreamwaves.

4) 2 ideas I got for mobile phones which I really like.

a) motion detection. sort of turning ur phone left and right to navigate in a game.. sort like the new concept nintendo “remote control” joystick. I thought processing images on the camera can sort of “motion detect” like how a optical mouse works. It turns up that image recognition/process and motion detection issnt that simple. Idea passed.

b) Using the mobile phone as a instrument tuner. now this is a cool idea, although there are alreay pc applications which can do that, i have not found any for mobile devices. dealing with this subject means diving into a deep topic: DSP.

The last time I found myself swimming (or drowning) in foreign waters in the idea of implementing a network 3d badminton shockwave game. I soon found out there I needed the knoweledge of the toics of networking, human anatomy, 3d modeling, texturing and animation, game programming, director/lingo scripting languages.. all requiring indept knowledge and experience in order to do so.

Anyway the topic of DSP(Digital Signal Processing) is “cheem” or complex. Application areas range from speech, audio, music, telephony radio, signal analysis, instrumentation, image processing, multimedia, radar. sonar, control, biomedical, transport to navigation. I thought what I needed to know was just DFT (Discrete Fourier Transformation) but I see engineering mathematics, signals, electronics and a whole bunch of stuff.

5) I had an idea of creating some excel macros for some scheduling forecast.
After some weeks I needed to find out if the yields can justify the effort to create one. Sometimes humans can just do things much efficiently if they put in a little of work. Technology cant solve everything.. sometimes the root of the problem lies with laziness. Anyway this is diving into yet another topic: timetable algorithms. It seems that the best way is using Genetic algorithm which uses some genetic biology ideas. In my rough understanding of it, it means getting a random sequence, then manipulate/evolve it until solutions are present.

In closing, you might understand my plight of “trying to be a jack of all trades, master of none”, I’m a mediocre, but maybe with much discipline, I will change.

Here’s an addictive weblink somewhere if you want to get yourself distracted too.