I remember the old times when doing PW that I had to write and compile the bibliography of the lengthy written report. It was a chore writing them in the correct format AND re-arranging them alphabetically.

And now, I have to do the same thing again for the overdue “Economics Year-end Research Assignment”. This time, Microsoft Word saved me loads of effort.

I fire it up, click on the “References” tab, click on the “Manage Sources” button and from there I can simply add in the sources I used.

Click on “bibliography” and there, I have a nicely formatted Bibliography all arranged and formatted nicely.

I wished I had this tool last year. Now back to writing that report.

I managed to obtain a rip of the first DVD of the Death Note anime. The quality of the episodes are superb. Pity that there aren’t any subtitles. But anyway, I managed to rip the creditless opening and ending for those who want them.

You can find the opening here and the ending here.

The video is encoded in H.264 and the audio is in AC3. If you have problems viewing them, try installing the Combined Community Codec Pack.

And a warning to those who download anime off the net in Singapore. I quote:

The government wants to clamp down on animation downloads effective… this year. Happy New Year. The figures passed down stated that my beloved motherland has 230,000 animation downloaders. We are the top in the world by population percentage, at, uh, 5%? Canada only has 20,000 more households, and yet they have a lot more maple trees than us.

Odex underlined that this sounded like a serious effort on the part of the authorities, who are sick of catching little mama-shops selling pirated batteries. Japanese animation presents a fine opportunity to round up more bodies because there are few legalities to work with (Odex holds most of the licenses for titles in my motherland). They have spoken with the authorities, and I quote, the police have ‘techniques to handle certain things’.

On the other hand, I quote again, ‘it’s not going to look good if the students are caught’. It will not be nice if the local No. 1 tabloid has a 15-page exclusive on 16-year-olds jumping off 20-storey buildings in an attempt to shake off hardened plainclothes raiders. So Odex, in a nice way, is giving us a heads up and telling us to stay down.

As for myself, I hardly download anything beside Death Note these days.

Lastly, Death Note inspired Music Video:

The hasty stroke goes oft astray.

A second entry for the day. An interesting post that cannot be missed.

Someone wrote an entry explaining the situation as mentioned in the post title. (Too long to type =P) Perhaps this explains the somewhat lack of comments here? (Probably also because I write badly, in that case I wouldn’t be bothered and just treat this blog as a sort of personal diary.)

An interesting read.

On a side note, he is a fan of Eureka seveN, as seen from his blog design. Kudos to that!

I’ve just came back from watching the movie. I must say, I can proclaim that it is definitely of “Death Note” standard. Much better than the first one which I would say was only a kind of appetiser and introduction to the world created by Tsugumi Ooba. If you didn’t like the first one, you should be give this a chance – you might like it!

WARNING: Detailed spoilers for the movie and manga follows. You have been warned!
Read the rest of this entry »

This is a test post made from Microsoft Word 2007 with its new blogging feature. Works pretty cool. I might want to add that I love the new User Interface for Office 2007.

School has begun again for year 2007. The orientation for the year ones is suspiciously similar to that of last year’s. The cheer is almost the same, the scoring system is somewhat the same, the groups system is almost a replica, and the games are so similar. It is, unfortunately, still pretty boring, even for a spectator for me, who unfortunately has to film the whole event from nearly the start till the end.

And with that I’ve spent these two days coming home feeling so tired I thought I would fall asleep in front of my computer.

Speaking of this, I think it’s time I start doing the long overdue holiday assignments. I should stop procrastinating.

Digital Life reported today that the broadband prices for Singapore are likely to drop and speed to be further increased with competitions from 3.5G and Wireless@SG. The slowest broadband plan (512 kbps) is already less than $30. (It was $50+ in the past.) The article also claims that we will have up to 10 gbps (Gigabits per second) access by 2012.

A good sign. We’ve been paying first world prices for lousy speed and service for what seems like aeons. But, we might want to look beyond the promised speed upgrades.

Honestly, even if you get the recent Starhub 100 mbps plan, you will not see your pages load in less than one second. Why? Because the speed quoted is the maximum speed you can attain, not the required speed they are obliged to serve you. Don’t forget that most of the sites we frequent, including this blog, are hosted on foreign soils. It is not very possible to reach up to those speeds unless you are visiting some local sites.

Take this speed test site for example. Try testing with a Singapore server and another server in say USA. You can truly see the speed difference.

On a side note, today is the last “free” day before school restarts for 2007. Hope this will be another great school year.

And can the anonymous author of this comment please identify yourself? I’ve absolutely no idea who you might be.

P.S.: I’ve heard some feedback that I’ve been writing stuff that’s too technical lately… Well, there isn’t much to say of myself so I turned to other stuff. Perhaps it’s time to change perspective again…

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Here I write about the first interesting stuff of the year, though this might sound a little technical.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Captcha, which is mainly used to tell SPAM bots apart from humans. Recently, SPAM bots have gotten around to downloading said Captcha images and analyse them, therefore rendering them useless.

HTML Encoded Captcha is an ingenious way of handling Captcha. It works by scanning through every single pixel of the Captcha image, getting the colour of that pixel, and then transforming them into HTML in many ways like using tables or div.

I’ve done a quick implementation here.

Pretty ingenious. And cool.

I think it seems more apt to write about what you want to achieve for the year 2007 in a post on the first day of the year.

• NAPFA Gold

  Seems a bit overkill to me but I think it’s time I try to aim for that. Working hard now.

• Finish up the tagboard which never seemed to be completed for its previous incarnations.
• Create a sort of “ultimate” web 2.0 framework for any portal like sites. (In process)
• Achieve 4 As and at least a Merit for H3 in A-levels. (This means a lot of hard work…)

That should probably be enough. For now.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.