Category Archive for ‘WebLinks’ at kepo-ing Zz85

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »

Archive for the 'WebLinks' Category

Blog Catchups

Published

Zz85

on February 19, 2007

in NS and WebLinks

. 0 Comments

29 Jan 07 Monday - Tires explosion and Cycling trip to tampines

Attempted cycling from Sembawang to Tampines and back for the first time. I had a gut feeling something was going to go wrong, and it happened. While inflating tires at the petrol kiosk, I didn’t notice that the outer tire had misaligned, causing the tube to be inflated to 182 psi(Pounds per square inch) - as the pressure was not contained by the tires then - when I only set the machine to 92psi. The road bike tires specify 100psi which is about 690 kpa (Kilopascal). Note that car tires normally take in about 200 kpa ( http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/SharaKhan.shtml). After pushing the super pressured front tire a little (my silly mistake), the tires went “boom”, my ears went “ti-waaang” and others looked around at me.

At least I got my inner tubing changed at the bike shop and continued my journey (without proper planning with a map) towards tampines. I reached after 2 hours, and traveled about 30km of distance, guided by instincts, a old man who was jogging, and a Indian foreign worker who was cycling. For those interested in the approximate route taken,

Canberra
Sembawang Road
Yishun Ave 5
Ave 2
Ave 1
Seletar Camp
SengKang East Ave
Hougang Ave
Tampines Rd
Old Tampines Rd
Tampines Ave 10

6 February 2007 Tuesday - Reflections at Bukit Chadu

Located near Font canning, and few bus stop from Singapore’s World trade center (near Harbor front MRT and Vivocity) is Bukit Chadu, the place where Malaya/Singapore had a last fight with the Japanese before the surrender.

Located on a hill, is a old, original but nicely renovated bungalow style colonial building. We went there as a unit, maybe my campmates didn’t think so but I found there was a good place where history was make real, interesting and easy to remember. Its a nice atmosphere, has exhibitions of real war equipment, with some stunning visual and audio effects.

It was where I was reminded the cruelty of war and the Japanese then, and of the bravery of soldiers and officers in the Malay Regiment

Links
Visitor information by National Heritage Board

Singapore History of its Invasion, War and Surrender in 1942

Bukit Chandu Official Site

Infomative article about The story of Bukit Chandu also known as Battle of Pasir Panjang

More infomation of the Reflects by Uniquely Singapore

Self-professed Programmerholic

Published

Zz85

on February 8, 2007

in Interesting Stuff, Technology and WebLinks

. 0 Comments

Early this year, disturbed by some ideas made me open notepad and started to whip up my first “web application” of the year.

A simple countdown DHTML page - a combination of html, javascript, css and dom - was created. The purpose was simple, to create a count down in different units (ie. years, months, weeks, days, hours, mins, seconds, ms) to my ORD date. A windows xp wallpaper is added as the background, then use Active Desktop to cover the entire desktop background, with the time remaining running continuously like magic. (css was used to create a bar chart to show percentage of time remaining in my whole ns, and the working hours left when run.. well i thought this could be improved to be come a booklet or wordpress plugin too)

This addiction to programming led me to coin the description “programmerholic” on my msn nick. This may give the impression of my love for programming, but it meant time, brain cells, effort were much used to compensate of my technical limitations. The byproducts are frustrations, messy coding but yet hopefully some working code, practicality and satisfactions.

Here’s another example how I’m program impulsively in a spurn of moment. My 2nd program of 2007 - another javascript “software” to solve a puzzle using brute force to find a solution to the many different combinations.

One weekend, I saw a link to a difficult Russian puzzle over at digg.com, a tessellation puzzle where 5 pieces were needed to be arranged into a confined area. The popular game called Tetris was invented by a russian, which makes me feel that they are very good with shapes.

Later that day, my friend searched “russian puzzle” and we eneded trying to solve another puzzle called 8 Queens - to place eight queens on a chessboard so that no queen attacks another over at http://sakharov.net/puzzle/.

This is a interesting puzzle, something which may not seem difcult, as you try to place the last few chese pieces on the board, you’ve find that its not so simple. Simple mathematics shows that there were going to be many combinations, but I knew the human mind was good enough to process and filter them quickly to get the answer. However, knowing that writting a script or program would spoil some fun, I did otherwise with the following reason

- We were having headaches that we didn’t really have concentration and patience to solve the puzzle
- Lazy to solve it the “normal human way”
- The computer could come up results faster and better than we do
- Computers are good at crunching numbers, which was what I was going to make it do

Therefore, I type the following into a html file (you can try it too), load it in the browser, and within seconds gave me 92 solutions (considered the board can be rotated 4 times, 23 solutions. with mirror images, perhaps less than 23 unique solutions with at least 1 solution non mirrorable pattern). Note: for the numbers displayed, each digit refer to the position of the queen- i thought using number could make a good data structure too.

return “have fun”; /* end of my post now for now.. */

solvequeens.htm
————————
<script> function valid(situation, level, position)


{

 

 for (var x=0;x<level;x++)

 {

  digit = Math.floor( situation / Math.pow(10,x)) % 10

  // check column
  if (position==digit) return false;

  // check diagonal

  left = position - x - 1
  right = position + x + 1

  if ((left>0) && (left==digit)) return false;

  if ((right<10) && (right==digit)) return false;
 }
  return true;
}
function solveQueen (situation, level)
{
 //alert( "Solving " + situation + " " +level)

 if (level==8) {

    sn ++;

    document.write

 ("Solution " +sn + " found! "+ situation +"<br/>")
    //alert ("Solution found! "+ situation)
    return true

 }
for (var x=1;x<=8;x++)

{

 if (valid(situation, level, x)) {
    //alert(situation+ " "+ x1)

    //solveQueen ((situation + x *

Math.pow(10,level)), level+1) // reverse number "data structure"
    solveQueen (situation * 10 + x , level+1)

 }

  
}

 // end solvequeen

}
sn = 0

alert("start")

solveQueen (0,0)

alert("end") </script>

Chinese Radical Lookup - Online and Freeware

Published

Zz85

on October 9, 2006

in Family, Technology and WebLinks

. 0 Comments

There are many good language tools online and free software for learning and studying Chinese, but have 1 website and 1 freeware that I like to recommend after recently used them - CCDICT- the online Chinese dictionary and WAKAN- Freeware tool for Japanese and Chinese language learners for Windows. Infact its a means of improving your Chinese, English, Cantonese or other dialects, Japanese and Korean with them.

Its a world of difference, my dad is well verse in different languages and dialects, but languages are my worst subjects - verbally, practically, and academically (maybe not that bad for computer languages). My dad taught me how to use a chinese dictionary when I was young. The most common method is by “hanyu pinyin” æ±‰è¯æ‹¼éŸ³, the standard way of pronouncing words using roman characters (Chinese Google/è°·æŒ has an auto pinyin conversion built into its search). However, at times my pinyin basics are weak or when you don’t know how to read the word you are looking for, there you look up the word via radical stroke. You take what seems to be the “suffix” of the word, and then look-up by the number of strokes in the character. Stroke is also one of the ways you can input Chinese text with on your hand-phone.

So back to the topic, the recommended website - languages of china is a web front to its ccdict database (both downloadable), buts its very powerful yet in a simple interface. You can lookup via radical/stroke, hanyupinyin, english translation, and finding the characters gives pronunciations in Chinese and dialects, simplified and traditional chinese, and explanation in English.

å’Œæ¼¢wakan project is what I found after I wanted all these features off-line/ downloaded. Its also very powerful and feature packed, in so you might require some time to explore its features and find out how to get what you need. I recommend you download its installer first.

If you are interested to find much more good tools (both freeware and online sites), you can search for their databases, namely CEDICT (Chinese-English Dictionary), EDICT (Japanese-English Dictionary), KDICT so on… there should be one something which suit your needs - including for palm and j2me

Chinese Bible on iPAQ

Published

Zz85

on June 7, 2006

in Beliefs, Technology and WebLinks

. 2 Comments

Recently I help someone who wanted to have a Chinese bible on her HP (previously Compaq) iPAQ.

Here’s how I did it in case you are interested to do it yourself too.

1. In order to transfer files, install applications or sync your Window Mobile 2003 (or Windows PocketPc 2002, or Windows CE) you will need to install Microsoft ActiveSync

2. One of the programs I found is e-Sword, a free, useful, powerful bible tool for multiple platforms. The version for windows-based PDA is called Pocket e-Sword. Go http://www.e-sword.net/pocketpc/downloads.html for downloads.
You will need to download the core software (sort of viewer with no content), then download the bible versions you want (I picked the KJV Red version and Chinese Union Simplified). (there are other Bible languages, commentaries, dictionaries, and devotionals add-ons to download too)

3. Unless your pda comes with chinese software already (02?), you will unless need to install chinese font into your windows. You can get it free at Declan’s Guide to Installing Chinese Fonts on a Pocket PC (Instructions included)
Remember to reset the pda, set your font options in pocket e-sword to the chinese fonts in order to display the chinese characters correctly.

Other alternatives?
Pocket e-Sword does not word wrap the chinese characters, making it slightly difficult to read compared to the english versions.

Olive Tree Bible Software - Bible software for variety of handhelds

NET Bible for Handhelds

There might not be too many other bible software , but there are Bible “ebooks” for different viewers too (pdf, microsoft reader). One way is getting a txt or word format document of the Bible and use the viewers to open them.