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  • 10 beautiful days in Australia

    I must say it was the best trip so far. Sydney (New South Wales) was nice, but Melbourne (Victoria) was really such a beautiful place, and I absolutely enjoyed the scenic drive along the Great Ocean Road. I will certainly return again!

    Panoramic view from the Three Sisters at Blue Mountans
    Beautiful Beaches

    On our way to the Great Ocean Road, we dropped by Pettavel Winery and Restaurant in Geelong for lunch and the food was awesome (so was the wine). We even saw people fly in via Helicopter so it must be really good. I’d highly recommend anybody going past Geelong to have a meal there. A decent meal with a glass of wine averages around S$40-60 per pax.

    Fine Dining at Pettavel

    The 2010 Holden Commodore SV6 with a 3.6l V6 engine we rented was also extremely fun to drive and handled really well around the winding coastal/mountain roads.

    Apollo Bay Motel and Holden SV6

    We also took a 10 minute heli ride in a Robinsons 44 which was worth the experience!

    12 Apostles taken from the Heli
    Robinsons 44 landing

    And of course there’s no visiting Australia without coming into contact with Seagulls. Here’s a really fat one.

    Fat Seagull

  • IPv6 over IPv4 (6to4) all up and working

    Yes, I’ve set myself out to learn IPv6. I thought it was simple – or at least with my understanding of IPv4. I was completely wrong! IPv6 has a much more complicated addressing scheme and “rules”. It requires a change of mindset for a start. The worst part? Getting it all to tunnel through IPv4 when you’re running dynamic IP.

    Anyhow, I’ve got my Linux (CentOS 5) box working and my home network is now “IPv6 ready” (hooray!) but I’m still tweaking the settings so I’ll update the technical stuff later.

    Some little bits about IPv6 I’ve learnt so far is that DHCP servers aren’t really required anymore. Interfaces can self-assign an IP based on their MAC address and this will be almost certainly unique (since MAC addresses are unique). Even in a controlled network, the interface would assign it’s own address.

    Meanwhile, here’s my traceroute to ipv6.google.com. šŸ˜€

    traceroute6: Warning: ipv6.l.google.com has multiple addresses; using 2404:6800:8005::63
    traceroute6 to ipv6.l.google.com (2404:6800:8005::63) from XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:1:217:f2ff:fe40:3848, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
    1Ā  XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:1::1Ā  0.534 msĀ  0.392 msĀ  0.410 ms
    2Ā  2002:c058:6301::1Ā  199.142 msĀ  199.858 msĀ  199.485 ms
    3Ā  2001:470:0:13b::1Ā  201.157 msĀ  200.728 msĀ  198.965 ms
    4Ā  2001:504:d::1fĀ  197.870 msĀ  199.858 msĀ  199.927 ms
    5Ā  2001:4860::1:0:21Ā  290.454 msĀ  203.619 msĀ  264.787 ms
    6Ā  2001:4860::1:0:77dĀ  220.451 msĀ  220.804 msĀ  436.060 ms
    7Ā  2001:4860::1:0:75Ā  511.964 msĀ  511.896 msĀ  320.166 ms
    8Ā  2001:4860::1:0:16Ā  703.447 msĀ  399.187 msĀ  624.945 ms
    9Ā  2001:4860::2:0:119cĀ  511.687 ms *
    2001:4860::2:0:119bĀ  529.863 ms
    10Ā  2001:4860:0:1::e3Ā  403.409 msĀ  517.593 msĀ  400.969 ms
    11Ā  * * *

    Hop 11 seems to have packet filtering and dropped my traceroute.

    I’ve also masked my internal LAN IP to XXXX:XXXX:XXXX otherwise somebody could connect back to my LAN segment. I haven’t had time to figure out the firewall yet. But you can say this is the beauty of IPv6. With a 128 bit address space, every machine has a public routable address.

    Once I have my home network all ready I will begin transitioning all my servers to IPv6. Embrace technology.

  • The ladder

    A friend of mine was unhappy with his work and asked when he would make it up the corporate ladder. I shared the following with him and thought it makes a good blog post.

    Maybe I’ll elaborate on the corporate ladder part. Big companies (in your case) are big enough that you are actually insignificant. Not just you, everybody else is dispensable. These companies have stood the test of time and will stand even if the key people leave. This is what makes a company – it’s structure. CEO leaves, so what? There’s stillĀ many people under working despite his absence. People now know that if you throw a stone, you’ll hit a degree holder.

    “There’s many others that can do your job,” says your boss. Sad but true.

    The fact is that the corporate ladder is overrated and nobody should sit around a company waiting years over years to climb it. It just does not happen that way. Climbing the corporate ladder in a large corporation is mostly politics. Nobody I know sits around a company for a few years and gets promoted without meddling with some politics. Most who just stay put and “do their work” get at most a measly pay raise and hardly any promotion.

    Don’t think about the ladder. There’s a closed door at each floor. You need to convince the person staying there to open it for you. There’s usually only room for one on each floor, and that person has to go up as well. If he doesn’t move, you don’t move either.

    The alternative? Either work in a smaller company where your value is greater, or work for a company who would pay you more, or go start your own business.

  • Urgent to you, not urgent to me

    I guess society has gotten used to the term “urgent“. It’s pretty annoying that people send you e-mails that make requests to be completed in a day or two, citing them as urgent. I guess these people don’t realize urgent doesn’t involve the entire world and applies to their context and not mine. Don’t blame others for your own lack of planning and foresight. I have a lot of other urgent things to do too.

  • Second last CS3216 blog, lah!

    OK, Prof. Ben is chasing me for a blog and since I’m sitting here (at work, at this hour) waiting on a colleague, I shall write a short entry. I realized I haven’t been blogging for a while and my 105% honest excuse is that my manager went to Sungei Gedong Chalet (a.k.a. Reservist) so I was busy as hell covering some of his work.

    So here comes the second last blog entry. Aheem… (clears throat)

    I’d love to thank my wife, mother, father, etc. and of course Prof. Ben for inviting me to attend this class out of nowhere. I truly enjoyed my time and learnt a lot of things. Actually, I joined the class with the aim to learn anything, or what Prof would call “random stuff“, not to develop Facebook apps. I’ve actually had enough of Facebook apps back in 2007 where I worked in a small company dealing with some very first Facebook applications being made out of Singapore, although building an app for others and building an app for yourself is a different thing altogether.

    So what have I really learnt? I’ve learnt that my English sucks after four years of being bombarded by Singlish in the local workforce. I’m actually struggling to write a proper blog entry every time.

    I’ve also learnt that I’ve lost touch with the geek world. I didn’t even know what Google Wave was. I’ve never heard of Prezi, and I’ve never heard of DropBox. There’s probably about 100 other things I’ve never heard of that I found out during these 13 weeks.

    I’ve also found out that damn NUS students can talk and present! Sorry lah, but to the outside world NUS students are either like nerds or CMI. šŸ˜›

    I’ve also found out that a year 1 freshie can actually learn ActionScript 3 build a Flash game within 1 week.

    So there are super things that people can do that you’ve never thought was possible. But, now I know the power to create lies within, and I finally kicked myself in the ass and learnt how to build stuff in Flash. So, yes, I picked up a new language. Programming language, not French.

    I also face newĀ challenges trying to get things done. I think it’s a little different everywhere. Back in Polytechnic, it was either nobody cares, or maybe I cared too much. Yufen once said doing project a with me gave her “ę»”č¶³ę„Ÿå¤šå¤šļ¼Œęˆå°±ę„Ÿå°‘å°‘”Ā (great sense of satisfaction, no sense of achievement. Did I translate right?) because I practically wrote most of the code and we’ll all get an ‘A’. šŸ˜›

    Then at work you could K people ‘cos they either deliver the goods or get fired. It was the root of all evil at work. $$$

    Then in NUS it was also different – everybody cared too much, but was too busy. Like Prof. Ben said, this is not the typical NUS class. OK, I buy his explanation.

    So anyway, CS3216 is a weird class, but I guess it’s weird in the right way.

    Back to work…

  • Singapore to Tokyo in 13 hours

    No, I’m not talking about the flight time. I’m talking about the time at which I bought my plane tickets to the time I actually landed in Tokyo. Yes, this is my first trip out of Singapore without much prior planning – the tickets were bought at about 6pm, and the flight was at 11:50pm the very same night. The wife made a very haphazard booking with a hotel and we’re off on an 8 hour flight to Tokyo.

    It wasn’t a good idea really, but the wife had an important certification training that got confirmed quite last minute and due to the school holidays, there weren’t any tickets on the weekend. She refuses to travel alone and so the husband must tag along.

    I arrived at Tokyo and it was really cold (slighly below 10 degrees C). I had a fugly green winter jacket that I bought seven years ago when I went to China, but it was way too puffy for this weather, so my first stop at Narita International was to grab a decent winter jacket.

    Anyway, fastrack a little bit. Most Japanese can’t speak English(some tokyo escorts can), and that’s my biggest problem here. Things are horribly, horribly expensive as well, e.g. no decent meal below S$10 per person. Nothing you can really buy for less than S$5 except canned drinks and MacDonalds’. My Hotel is miserably small for S$170/night. The entire room including the bathroom is actually about the size of my bedroom w/o the bathroom. Oh, and also, almost every non-living thing here talks by itself – lifts, trains, doors,Ā pedestrianĀ crossings,Ā restruants, escalators, stairs… I’m serious! It warns you to mind your step!

    This is the most automated and robotic place I’ve seen. Even people keep talking non stop – I mean the retail staff. You go to a counter and pay for something, the moment they greet you, they go on saying things (I cannot understand) until you get your change and they bid you goodbye. But the people are really polite and I do enjoy being around this place as a visitor. Working here is probably another different thing altogether. I’m about to head out of my hotel to take a photo of the peak hour rush on a Monday morning.

    Tokyo Subway Map

    If you think Singapore’s MRT/LRT is messy, wait till you see Japan’s JR/Bullet Train/Tokyo Subway maps. The map above is just the Tokyo Subway alone. There’s the JR and Bullet Train not shown here. Bullet Train is quite straightforward though, it has only a few stops as it was designed to go long distance really fast.

    On the side note, while I was walking down Roppongi with my wife this evening, two crazy angmohs (Caucasians)Ā came up to me and tried to poke fun of me – maybe they were cracking some racist jokes or something. I told them off (in English, of course) that “I’m not a fucking local.” I guess they were a little surprised when I responded that way. These angmohs had better behave in other peoples’ country, seriously. I don’t know what they were thinking poking fun of Japanese in Japan. Somebody should kick their ass.

    P.S. How is it possible for a map not to be north bound?!? The Tokyo tourist map is not north bound! I’m having a hard time reading it with my compass!