Perpetually Bored

It’s been almost two months since I planned on downgrading my mobile phone plan but I’ve still not gotten down to doing it. I’ve meant to on a number of occasions, but the crowd at my service provider’s, SingTel, outlets scare me. The crowd outside is reminiscent of the queues for bread in the cold winter of February 1917 in St. Petersburg, except that it remains constant all year round, never seeming to shrink. Most of them are subscribing to a new line. In a country of five million, and each individual is estimated to have an average of 1.5 mobile phones, it astonishes me how much the telecommunications industry can keep growing, and the endless amount of customers they pull in each day.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told WSJ staffers to ditch Flash and replace Flash-based content with other web standards—a move that’s doable, but not necessarily trivial.

via Steve Jobs to WSJ: ditch “dying” Flash technology.

I’m seldom in agreement with Apple’s philosophy of doing things. However, this is one bold move that I applaud and would want manufacturers to follow.

The trouble with Flash is that, like the less popular Java, it is essentially an external application that is being embedded in a web page. Having to depend on an external application is bad for security. It is my belief that executable code should never cross from the browser on to the desktop for no good reason. What’s more is that the use of Flash goes against one of the fundamentals of the web: accessibility. Content in Flash is encased in its own container and not text-searchable. If a website is designed entirely in Flash, there is no way for a search engine to index the content of it, neither is there a way to link to a specific page within that flash content. You can’t point a hyperlink to a particular frame of Flash content.

It’s time that we took up the axe against Flash and replace it with newer and web-friendlier technology, such as HTML5 and JavaScript. I’m glad that at least one company sees the problems behind Flash and is taking decisive action to move the world away from it.

If I were to appear as a messed up individual from the first day I arrived, that would be the expectation of me, and no one would bat an eyelid if I failed to deliver.

However, if I were to perform optimally since day one, but on one day, unable to deliver a particular piece of work, the wrath of the brass above me would be incurred and all their fiery anger and resulting consequences brought to bear upon on me.

Compared the first and second case. The former would be multiple failures with little or no consequences, whereas in the latter, it would be one tiny road hump, but with drastic consequences.

The conclusion drawn is that it would be far more beneficial for one’s well-being to fail consistently rather than occasionally.

Expectations are such a strange thing.

“They spent $7 million on this stupid sidewalk,” he said, “and it’s tilted so that when it rains, the water comes into the stores. With such people in government, we will have the same circumstances forever.”

via In Heart of Iraq, a Plan to Revive the Pulse of a Central Artery – NYTimes.com.

Reading about the reconstruction project in Iraq, I can’t help but think of the developments of certain employer that I am compelled to work for. Regardless of the amount of effort and resources that goes into research and development, on the ground, nothing seems to have been improved. On the contrary, some apparatchik rushing to implement his latest new idea, probably thought of while taking a dump early Sunday morning, seems to drown the system further deeper in mud. The direction of this employer’s latest buzzword filled attempt at edging towards the next ‘third generation’ development echoes hauntingly similar to the CIA’s misadventures in Latin America during the Cold War era.  Ultimately, larger and larger pool of resources are expended, but the life the commoner, or in my case, employee reminds the same.

It’s as if the web has been engulfed by a blanket of silence. For the past few days that I’m home, there hardly has been any activity. Instead of the 50 over new articles that my RSS reader picks up per day, it has been a trickle of two or three max. It would seem that the activities of the holiday season was successful in uprooting people from their seats.

The extended weekend has been unremarkable for me, even borderlining on absolute boredom. I did manage to play a couple hours of EQ2, which is quite remarkable considering I hardly find any reason to do so these days. Station Market has a really neat 44 slot backpack, the Sinister Frostfell Backpack, complete with a Frostfell-theme appearance. At $20, it was pricey, but I gave in, though more so for the number of slots than it’s appearance.

At the same time, Steam is having a major discount on a number of games, and Christmas capitalism was having an effect on me, resulting in me buying a number of games for $10 and under. A number of them, despite their ratings and associated hype, felt rather mediocre to me. The campaign in Red Alert 3 seemed to be progressing at too fast a pace compared to it’s predecessors. A few missions in and I already had the full tech tree unlocked and was driving the enemy back into, uh, wherever they came from. Contrast that to the campaigns of before, where one side usually had a solid 12 – 15 missions. FarCry 2’s gameplay was unimpressive either. The majority of time involved traveling and the firefights were sporadic.

My spending didn’t stop there. While reading an article entitled Faux Friendship about the changes in the way friendship is characterized and defined in relation to the proliferation of social networking sites, I stumbled across an amazing TV series, ‘In Treatment’.

In Treatment is drama revolving a psychotherapist and five patients of his, with five episodes each week, and each episode being a session with a patient. After watching an episode on Google Video, I was completely hooked, and bought the whole season on DVD. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s phenomenal. I’m trying to not blow through the entire season at once, but there’s hardly anything else to do.

If Linus Torvalds can still rely on a text-based email client as his primary form of communication, and yet achieve so much, do I really need all these new medium of communications that has been offered to us in the recent years?

I have a 12 Mbps internet connection at home through the coaxial cable network, which serves as my primary means of communicating with the outside world, and well, survival. I also have a mobile phone with both a voice and data plan, and an additional mobile line with just a data plan. I have push email on my mobile phone, my contacts are pulled from Google Apps Premier through MS Exchange ActiveSync and additionally, I can also choose to leave an IM client open constantly, all subjected to the irregularities of network coverage, of course. That’s ubiquitous connectivity wherever I go.

I’ve been reevaluating my finances recently, and have come question if the amount spend on that level of connectivity is justified. In reality, I keep in touch with only a tiny subset of the people I come across daily, countable using the fingers of one human hand.

I haven’t made a single phone call for chatting purposes since early this year when my base was quarantined due to H1N1, and I send/receive less than 30 text messages on average monthly. Do I really need that voice plan, and instead, can I do VoIP if I really had to make a call? I could. What’s that mean? I could drop the voice plan and have an additional $30 a month in my pocket.

So that leaves me with two data plans, well, I could just drop of them. Combined with the above, that’s $50 a month saved.

I’ve been using technology with the ‘because I can’ mentality, rather than question myself if I really do need them. If this were an IT department, I would have invested in a lot of infrastructure with little or negligible practical value, and essentially, done a whole lot of bad budget management. Good IT management is not about jumping head first into the next bleeding edge technology, but rather, evaluating and them and getting only what is essential.

Sometimes, I think that we (the people I come across going about my daily activities) are complete utter failures, and that’s including myself. We’re unwilling to do anything to change our present situation, even if we dislike it. For example, each day, we go to the cookhouse and whine about how bad the food is, but we do nothing about it, and during the surveys, we still give it a reasonable score. Compare this to Kosovo in 1981, where a group of students from the University of Pristina staged a protest over bad food in their cafeteria, and that eventually erupted to nationwide riot which had to be put down by the Yugoslav Army. Although bad food was only one out of the multitude of reasons, it was the spark that set off all the bottled displeasure and anger in the people. Think about it, something as simple as bad food in the cafeteria.

Here, we choose to constantly knuckle under and do nothing. Are we utter failures or what?

Ever since I was drafted, I do a fair amount of web browsing from a mobile device, and most of time using a 3G cellphone. More recently, I’ve been using my iPod Touch too.

The most limiting factors on a mobile device are bandwidth and screen real estate.

The trouble is that most web content are crammed with advertisements. To read a 8 kb paragraph of text, I’ve to load, and wait while 150 kb worth of content I don’t care about loads. After that’s done, I’ve to zoom in, pan, and maybe squint to actually look for what I want, interspaced with even more advertising. All of these contribute to a painful mobile web experience.

The proliferation of internet-enabled devices and maturing of various wireless technologies means that the number of people that view web content on mobile devices would continue increasing in the next few years. Web developers and designers alike ought to keep this group of audience in mind.

As for me, I yearn wistfully for the web of old, before advertisers and penny hungry webmasters polluted the web.

It was an evening of watching Future Weapons and reading Wikipedia. It wasn’t an entirely unproductive evening though and I walked away with a theory, or an opinion, that the standard anti-tank weapon used by infantry here is nothing but a glorified wall smasher.

The MATADOR was developed jointly by DSTA (Singapore) and Rafael (Israel). However, different variants of the weapon are employed by the Singapore and Israeli army, with more options for export purposes. It seems however, we chose poorly.

Singapore operates the MATADOR MP in which the warhead can be fired either in HEAT or HESH mode. The selection between the two is done by extending the probe in the front of the weapon for HEAT mode, and leaving it in it’s original configuration for HESH.

HEAT is a high explosive shaped charged, which simply means that its explosive is shaped – guided and concentrated in a certain direction, in order to allow it to breach armor. HESH operates by splattering a layer of plastic explosives (think throwing an egg and its contents sticking to the wall) and then detonating the explosive. HEAT destroys by penetrating armor itself and blowing up, HESH destroys by sending a shock wave through the armor.

Israel operates the MATADOR AS, which is a HEAT only warhead but has two charges, and delay between the first charge and second charge can be set by turning the knob in the front on the weapon. This is called a tandem charge. Simply put, the two charges in the warhead explode at a different timing.

Most modern tank defend themselves against rocket attacks by employing reactive armor. Reactive armor contains a layer of explosives in the form of shaped charges that, upon contact with an incoming rocket, explodes in a certain fashion and destroys the warhead before it can sufficiently penetrate the hull of the tank. Reactor armor are usually placed on tanks in ’slabs’, as pictured below. Those ugly rectangular slabs all over the tank are pieces of reactive armor. Although not the original intention, the spacing between the slabs of reactive armor also serves to reduce the effect of a HESH round as the plastic explosives cannot be applied uniformly and are scattered due to the spacing, resulting in a less effective explosion. In addition, most modern tanks line their interior with shock absorbers making HESH rounds even less effective.

So, I’ve made a tank sound indestructible. Here is where the tandem-charge on the MATADOR AS comes into play. When the rocket hits the target initially, the first charge on it’s warhead goes off, and so does the reactive armor in response. The reactive armor plate is now gone, and a split second later, the second charge on the warhead explodes, piercing through the unprotected hull.

The MATADOR MP which Singapore operates does not have such a capability. Not to discredit the weapon fully, plastic explosives are effective against concrete and thus HESH is therein lies the only usefulness of the weapon in HESH mode – breaching and entering. As an infantryman, I’ll be real upset about lugging a 11.3kg piece of equipment around just to watch it do nothing against a modern tank, and the T72 isn’t even modern.

Before anyone thinks of charging me for anything ridiculous, all of the information obtained in reaching my conclusion were from freely published and unclassified sources.

I can’t help thinking that the real reason we have all these arms limitation treaties governing what weapons could or could not be used during war is because politicians don’t want their war to end fast.

We have the equivalent of that in RTS games, such as the C&C series, where players would set mutual rules such as no superweapons or no attacking for 20 minutes for the same reason. We don’t want to spend time setting up a game to have it end in 5 minutes. Neither do politicians want to spend time mobilizing and preparing for a war, just to have it all end in the 20 minutes it takes for their intercontinental nuclear weapons to find their targets. It’s simply no fun, and it doesn’t give enough time for the military industries which politicians are often tied to, or have a background in to profit from it.

The next time you hear about the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the various forms of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), thinking about familiar terms such as “no rush 20″ and “no superweapons”.