Zit Seng's Superwall

What do students at NUS do? Shop of course. Why, it’s the National University of Shopping Singapore. Is this a shopping centre in disguise? Week after week, it is one bazaar after another. At multiple locations, no less. And some stalls even have “branches” at different locations.

At the start of this acad year, I thought there was a lack of the usual buzz. After matriculation, it was so quiet. Then a week later, bazaars after bazaars soon started running, sometimes even back to back. But something has caught my attention. Since a year ago, I was beginning to notice an obvious trend of repetition, no theme, no innovation, no creativity. It was becoming like a regular pasar malaam, albeit one running from 9-to-5.

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Well, my fingers were itchy, and I wanted to test something out. Something that carried a small but inherent risk of mucking up. I was careful, no less, to make sure there would be no mistakes, no typos. In fact, I wrote a “rollback” script to undo the changes after a timed delay, just as a precaution. So, even if the changes mucked up the system, the changes would be automatically rolled back anyway. Then, how about testing this rollback script too? Ah, that’s where it screwed up. Something else was broken, and the rollback script got stuck, and it disconnected my server from the net.

And so in the dead of the night, I had to make a trip down to the colo data centre to fix my server. The security guard was delighted to have some company. I wasn’t. Well at least not in the wee hours of a Monday morning. He was in the mood to chat, and I tried my best to be polite.

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Ian Murdock came by in the past week to talk about his open source journey from Linux at Purdue University, founding the Debian project, and now working as the Chief OS Platform Strategist for Sun Microsystems. I suppose he couldn’t help sounding out some of the advantages of Solaris. Things like DTrace, Containers and ZFS are neat.

There was a passing comment about how OpenSolaris and the Indiana project was going to make Solaris more friendly. Such as having a graphical install. Oh how funny. When I installed my first SunOS 4.something over a decade ago, it was already a graphical install.

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Sighted the Apple iPhone on sale here in Singapore. Didn’t know it was available? Hmmm I thought the phone was slick, until I saw how clunky it was. Think I’d pass for an N-Series gadget.
— Posted from my N73 Lifeblog.

We have a data centre that recently became the first in South East Asia (or perhaps in Asia too) to operate a certain type of liquid cooled rack. Liquid cooling technology is actually not new; It was quite common maybe 2 decades ago. The large mainframe computers of that era produced so much heat that they needed to be cooled by chilled water or refrigerant. Liquid cooling has become less common since then. Nowadays, the thought of water in a data centre is unimaginable to many data centre operators. But today, the advent of very high density computing is beginning to re-introduce liquid cooling into data centres.

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Roast pork from the Guild House. One of the choice from their Oktoberfest set dinners. I had thought it would be like pork knuckles but well it wasn’t. Quite good anyhow.
— Posted from my N73 Lifeblog.

I recently came across a new high-speed wireless development that promises over 10Gbps of bandwidth, or some 100-times the speed of current Wi-Fi networks. While existing Wi-Fi operates at 2.4GHz frequency, this new technology uses 60GHz millimetre wave radio technology. What’s interesting about 60GHz is its oxygen absoption properties: 60GHz electromagnetic energy is absorbed by oxygen molecules much like a piece of food in a microwave oven.

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So I was at BPP this morning having breakfast, and I thought I’d login to Wireless@SG hoping to get some work done. The Wi-Fi signal was weak, and after finding my SSH connection getting stuck repeatedly, I eventually gave up. It made me think, again, how Wireless@SG is doomed to fail.

In case you didn’t know, Municipal Wi-Fi (i.e. city-wide Wi-Fi like what Singapore is doing) has failed in many cities in the US. Projects such as those in San Francisco, Houston, and St Louis are in trouble. Previously announced deployments in Chicago, Cincinnati, Anchorage and Alaska have been canceled.

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Vanessa’s testing her vocal chords again, screaming and screaming as we went out to BPP this morning, and later when we tried to have a mini photo shoot in the afternoon. They’re screams of delight and excitement. Funny, the screams actually sounded like those dinos in Jurassic Park. Hmm, we’re having a mini Jurassic Park with us. Anyway, here’s a self portrait taken, hmm, last week I think. Straight from the N73 camera. Vanessa looks a bit grouchy here.

Chicken Karaage from Sukiya at YIH is quite delicious, but the rice was not properly cooked. Perhap chef was in a hurry. Set meal includes miso soup, desert and drink for $7.80.
— Posted from my N73 Lifeblog.