D'Fest II - Rise of the Cat Mountain King and Golden Phoenix

A splendid meal of Mao Shan Wang and Jing Feng.





Surrounded by court ministers.

Simpsons nib the bug

Stumbled on this article while scanning the web for a wristband mosquito repellent. HOMeR is a home-made solution to repelling mosquitoes. I have heard about the anti-mosquito property of lemongrass but so far, it hasn't been too successful for me. Perhaps because I'm not using them right. I tried soaking the grass stems in water and heating them as though the saps would diffuse into the supporting water body and evaporate. Duh!

But for me, my first objective is to use and effective method to eradicate them, not just ward them off. And so far, my electric lamp zapper seems to work pretty well. Oh, and by the way, I'm looking to purchase ovi-traps. Anyone knows where I can get one?

Durian Invasion

Yeah! After months of waiting, the durian season is finally here again. Bought two "Ang Bak" and one "Jiu Ji" at 717 this evening and savoured this with my BH. Enjoy!

"Ang Bak"

"Jiu Ji"

Amazon Fair Price

Singaporeans would know FairPrice (affectionately known as NTUC). That's our local grocery chain, and maybe even more. It's funny that Amazon has been driven to sell groceries online. Is there a market sufficiently large that warrants a horizontal expansion that is a little far fetch from books, electronics and the likes. But anyway, it's cool and I'm looking forward to similar new products from Amazon's competitors, e.g. Gigantic Google and Mammoth Microsoft. Yeah!

How to change your hosts file in Vista

Secure, but good! If you ever wondered how to add manual entries to your hosts file, here's the solution.

I've been stumped for months and this certainly comes as a relief.

Update: I have written a tiny programme to make editing your hosts file a little more convenient. Here it is.

Data mining on the Grid

This is neat. I just read about the production release of Weka4WS, a Grid-enabled data mining platform. For those of you who are familiar with Weka, it is a product out of the University of Waikato, New Zealand. It is a Java-based data mining platform with many commonly used machine learning and decision-making algorithms. If you would like more information about Weka, I would suggest you grab a copy of the book entitled "Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Second Edition (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems).

Weka4WS uses the WSRF features of Globus toolkit 4.0.4. So, in order to install and use Weka4WS, you must first need to install the GT4 platform and this can be daunting for new users to the Grid. Good luck!

GSS - Google

My absence from blogging is best explained with two reasons:
1. I have been away attending a course on Oracle 10g Spatial Fundamentals; and
2. Just plain lazy to write.

In a short span of two weeks, Google has been on a buying spree again. Panoramio and FeedBurner, both of which I have subscribed to, were recently acquired by the mother of all search engines. Does this bode well? For now I don't see how it will affect me much except for a single platform and account for managing all these web-based tools.

For now, I'm more interested in the developments at Google on mapping-related projects.