I was recently asked a simple question, but it turned out to be awfully difficult to answer: “What is the difference between iPhone and Android?” It was asked, quite obviously, by a lay person. First of all, the question is wrong. The iPhone is a specific type of phone, whereas Android refers to the software that runs on a variety of phones. The correct comparison would be between iOS and Android. It’s precisely because a lay person asked the question…
It’s something that has been happening for a long time – the hogging of seats at dining places and perhaps just about any other place of business with air-con and comfortable chairs. But it didn’t go as far back as during my own studying days. Somewhere along the way, students have migrated from studying in libraries to studying in more trendy hangout places.
Do you sometimes want to order food in when you’re feeling too lazy to go out, but you have second thoughts thinking about how delivery could take longer than you care to wait? Well, how would you like to have pizza delivered to your door step, fast, and guaranteed? That’s the promise of Domino’s Pizza. Their tagline, “The World’s No. 1 Pizza Delivery Company” says a lot about their commitment. You’ll get your pizza in 30 minutes, otherwise they’ll give…
No, not the game Second Life, but trying to give a second lease of life to old abandoned hardware. Recently I noticed a big bunch of IBM blade servers lying round, dismantled, and stacked on the floor. I thought it would be good to take over them and use them for some student projects. So I went around to seek blessings to officially hijack the blades. I didn’t really know what was in the blade, or their hardware configuration, and…
This is the new Ng Ah Sio Pork Rib Soup Eating House. If you haven’t heard of or been to this place, you could be forgiven for thinking it looks like Ya Kun Kaya Toast. Or perhaps you might think it’s a new business spin off from Ya Kun Kaya Toast, seeing that this looks like a full-service restaurant, not quite the same self-service concept of the usual Ya Kun Kaya Toast. But it’s totally not so. It’s the modernised…
I recently found myself babysitting a certain web application project as it went live. It was besieged with many performance problems as it scaled up to meet real-life usage. This is a pretty common problem. I deliver a guest lecture from time to time on the topic of building scaleable web application infrastructure, and although this is something pretty familiar to me, I can see that many people are bewildered by the complexities of real-world production web application infrastructure.
This matter about professionalism at work was raised recently, and I thought I have some 2 cents to share about, particularly to people who are just starting out their work life. This is not about professionalism in the context of your job specification, but about the work itself that you do for your company. They are not the same thing. For example, a real estate agent could be very professional in his conduct with his customers, but could be lesser…
When I bought my PC recently, it was a very ordinary PC, and yet it was specially customized. It was customized to exactly what I wanted, because I selected everything that went into it. Yet at the same time, it wasn’t anything very out-of-the-ordinary. In particular, the CPU I chose to go with was the Intel Core i5-2400 CPU. I also went for H67-based Sandy Bridge motherboard. I can just imagine many DIY techie persons will find this a little…
It was Climate Action Day at NUS yesterday. This year, it’s also more commonly known as the Day of No Rubbish Bins. That’s because the organizers, for the strangest and most inane reasons, felt that rubbish bins have something to do with climate. The action this year was to remove all (or most) rubbish bins around campus, and this is supposed to create awareness about our climate and environment. Yeah, right. It is working, because we’re now all so indignant…
I think the best upgrade you can do for your computer is to replace its conventional disk drive with a Solid-State Drive (SSD). Particularly so on a notebook or or netbook, since conventional disks on them tend to spin slower. I started looking at SSDs last year. The price then was still prohibitively expensive. But at the end of last year, I managed to snag a pretty good deal on an excellent performing consumer grade SSD. It’s the OCZ Vertex…
