The understatement of the month would be calling this a peculiar moment. This is far from peculiar–this is straightup WTF?! My favorite encryption software, TrueCrypt, has been abruptly and mysteriously shut-down(que dramatic music!!!). The official TrueCrypt website now only has some information on ‘alternatives’ and offers the following advice. WARNING: Using TrueCrypt...
A Coalition of Muslim NGOs have asked for Cadbury to pay for the ‘cleansing’ of the blood of Muslims to remove any traces of Pig DNA they might have consumed from having eaten Cadbury chocolates. I’m not going to debate the religious and legal implications, just the scientific aspect. The aspect which says that the DNA of what you eat doesn’t enter your blood–and...
Pi has always held a special place in my heart and probably yours as well. When people ask me to pick a number between 1 to 10, I always pick Pi (or sometimes the square root of two), which hasn’t made me the life of many parties. And there’s an entire community of Pi lovers like me out there–people who are just fanatical about calculating pi to the trillions of digits? With...
Last weekend I had an issue with my hosting provider, WPWebHost. I switched to WPWebHost 2 years ago, and recommended them because they promised wordpress hosting at an affordable rate. WordPress hosting is where the hosting provider would support wordpress specific features, e.g. help troubleshoot plugin and theme issues, perform nightly backups, and offer ‘higher availability’ for...
There’s a highway they want to build from Damansara to Puchong–called Kidex, and just like any other highway before, people are understandably worried about the construction. This excerpt from the KL-Chronicle details the causes of anxiety: [box icon=”chat”]Kidex will be constructed over heavily built-up residential areas in Petaling Jaya and will pass very close to...
Teachers day was last Friday, and I thought it would be good to make a small post in tribute to an interesting teacher I had in form 4. Imagine a 200 pound man, with a thick moustache, carrying intimidating rotan, and wore nothing but Chairman Mao style Bush-coats everyday–that’s Mr. Vijay, and he thought me Additional Mathematics. Mr. Vijay was interesting in many ways, including the...
I drive a Prius–it’s a magnificent car, and if you think otherwise just ask me about the mileage. But when I tell people I drive a Prius, I get a sneer and look that suggest I must be a bumbling idiot, you know the one where their face wrinkles up near the nose. People ask the usual mileage questions (5Liters/100km if you’re curious), and make some oft-remark about the...
Do a quick experiment: 1. Fill a glass half-full with water 2. Drop a couple of ice-cubes into the glass 3. Measure the water level before the ice melts 4. Measure the water level after the ice melts Now compare the water level before and after the ice melted, and you’ll find them to be the same. So if melting ice doesn’t increase the water level in your glass–why do melting ice...
We are all a single species, all of us share a common DNA, so common that if yours changed by a mere 2% you’d be a chimpanzee. We share one atmosphere, from which we breath the same air–not just with other humans alive today, but those of past times as well. In fact, every breath you take contains a slither of air from the breadth of everyone else–who has ever lived. I stand in...